In a press release last month, the Takis & Louki Nemitsas Foundation announced the selection of Anastasia Ailamaki, Professor and Director at EPFL’s Data-Intensive Applications and Systems Laboratory, as the Laureate of the NEMITSAS Prize 2018 in Computer Science.
The decision to honor Professor Ailamaki was made by an International Experts’ Committee, which included Prof. Joseph Sifakis (Université Grenoble Alpes, France), Prof. Tony Hey (Chief Data Scientist at Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK), and Prof. Constantinos Daskalakis (MIT, USA). It was unanimously approved by the foundation’s Board of Directors.
The Nemitsas Foundation was established in 2009 to award Cypriot scientists who excel either in Cyprus or abroad with their inventions and discoveries. This year, the selected stream was Computer Science.
The foundation invited nominations and applications from computer scientists worldwide and submitted the candidatures to the Experts’ Committee for evaluation in June. The Committee selected Professor Ailamaki for her outstanding work through the years in data-intensive systems and large-scale scientific and business applications. The citation reads:
“It has been decided to propose Ms. Anastasia Ailamaki, Professor at EPFL, for the 2018 Nemitsas Prize in Computer Science for her numerous seminal contributions at the intersection of computer architecture and database systems, showing how the design of modern processors impacts the performance of database systems.”
Professor Ailamaki will receive the award on October 4 in a special ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Cyprus. It will be presented in person by President Nicos Anastasiades.
The award is an important addition to Professor Ailamaki’s long list of distinctions, which include an ERC Consolidator Award (2013), a Finmeccanica endowed chair from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon (2007), a European Young Investigator Award from the European Science Foundation (2007), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2005), an NSF CAREER award (2002), and ten best-paper awards in scientific conferences.