Professors Paolo Ferragina and Giovanni Manzini of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pisa will collect the important international “Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award” from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on June 10 in San Francisco.

Established in 1996, the ACM Kannellakis Award is given on an annual basis for “specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing.”  This award is second in importance only to the Turing Prize, considered the Nobel Prize in Computer Science.

Past winners include the inventors of cryptography and public key (Diffie, Hellman, Rivest, Shamir, Adleman, and Merkle), of probabilistic primality testing (Miller, Rabin, Solovay, and Strassen), of the locality sensitive hashing technique (Broder, Charikar, and Indyk), of Support Vector Machines (Cortes and Vapnik), of the boosting technique for machine learning adopted in AdaBoost (Freund and Schapire), and of the Interior Point Method for linear programming (Karmarkar).

Paolo Ferragina and Giovanni Manzini are the first Italians to be awarded the prize. The award was given for their scientific achievements in the area of compressed indexes. Along with them, Michael Burrows, a researcher at Google, will also receive the award. Burrows, together with David Wheeler (who died in 2004), invented the data compression technique based on an input transform (Burrows-Wheeler Transform) that was extended with new algorithmic techniques by Ferragina and Manzini.  These results revolutionized studies of compressed data structures, with impressive advancements in the fields of data compression and computer science applied to genomics.

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