2010 ACM Turing Award: Leslie Valiant

Last month, the 2010 ACM Turing Award was awarded to British computer scientist Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University:

For transformative contributions to the theory of computation, including the theory of probably approximately correct (PAC) learning, the complexity of enumeration and of algebraic computation, and the theory of parallel and distributed computing.

 
Valiant’s fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory (in particular, probably approximately correct learning) brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as in natural language processing, handwriting recognition and computer vision.

Read the full award citation.

(also see: the 2009 recipient, as well as the full chronological listing of awards)