Prof. Tei-Wei Kuo and Prof. Chih-Jen Lin of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering were honored for their world-class research contributions by being elected as 2015 Association for Computing Machinery Fellows in June.  The ACM fellowship is the organization’s most prestigious award.  The election of Prof. Kuo and Prof. Lin is not only a great personal honor for these two professors, but a major event for the academic computer science community in Taiwan as well.

Founded in 1947, the ACM is the most important international organization in the field of information science, and its membership currently exceeds 100,000 computer science professionals.  The ACM introduced the ACM fellowship in 1993 to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of information science.

The CSIE Chair, Kun-Mao Chao, points out that this year a mere 42 people were elected as ACM fellows, all of whom are leaders in their respective areas of specialization.  Judea Pearl, the winner of the 2011 ACM Turing Award, which is considered the Nobel Prize of computer science, was also named among this year’s fellows.

In granting Prof. Kuo this fellowship, the ACM cited Kuo for his “contributions to performance and reliability enhancement of flash-memory storage systems.”  When he started teaching at the CSIE in 2000, Prof. Kuo observed a need in Taiwan’s embedded system and semiconductor industries and decided to throw himself into conducting research and development on embedded systems software, with a special focus on developing advanced technology for non-volatile memory products.

For more than a decade since then, Prof. Kuo has remained dedicated to promoting both theory and practical applications, establishing close relationships with industry, and developing commercially viable advanced technology.  Recognized as an academic pioneer in many areas of specialization, Kuo has driven research and development in non-volatile memory software and made a profound impact on the development of storage and memory technology.

Meanwhile, the ACM recognizes Prof. Lin “for contributions to the theory and practice of machine learning and data mining.”  Lin began his teaching and research career at the CSIE in 1998, becoming the then newly-established department’s first assistant professor.  Prof. Lin’s research is focused on machine learning and data science applications.  He developed his interest in machine learning only after joining the department and recruited a team of outstanding and creative students, many of whom were university students, to join his lab.

Following years of hard work, machine learning has grown into a popular field and much of the software developed by Prof. Lin and his students has become widely used in both the academic and industry communities.