Berger Honored by ACM SIGPLAN for Distinguished Service
Professor Emery Berger of the UMass Amherst Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) has received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) Distinguished Service Award, an honor granted annually to one recipient in recognition of their distinguished service contributions to the programming languages community.
The ACM established the award to recognize contributions to SIGPLAN, its conferences, publications, or its local activities. Berger, who co-directs the PLASMA (Programming Languages and Systems at Massachusetts) Laboratory at UMass Amherst, was selected this year in recognition of what the selection committee described as his tireless efforts to improve the programming languages research community.
In a statement released at the PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation) conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 27, 2024, the awards selection committee said, “Emery has been a driving force advocating for reproducibility and rigorous empirical evaluation in both research and the processes that enable meaningful research.”
Specifically, the committee cited Berger’s “deep passion for rigorous review processes,” which informed his previous service as PLDI Program Chair and co-Program Chair of the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), exemplified by his investigations of the effectiveness of double-blind reviewing to reduce bias in conference paper acceptance, which helped establish current SIGPLAN best practice.
Berger was also cited for his numerous open-source software projects, his creation of CSRankings.org, which provides objective information about computer science research programs, and for his service of two terms on the SIGPLAN Executive Committee and ten years as Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems.
Berger's notable software contributions include the memory managers Hoard, DieHard, and DieHarder, which have influenced Mac OS X, Windows 7, and Windows 8, as well as Scalene, a performance analyzer for Python that has been downloaded over 1 million times. His honors include a Microsoft Research Fellowship; an NSF CAREER Award; a Google Research Award; most influential paper awards from OOPSLA, PLDI, and ASPLOS; and best paper awards from USENIX FAST, OOPSLA, SOSP, and OSDI. He was named an ACM Fellow in 2019.