2020 ACM Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award Awarded to Professor Michael Franz

Earlier this year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced that Michael Franz, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), had been selected to receive the ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award. The award recognizes “individuals or groups who have made surprising, disruptive, or leapfrog contributions to computing ideas or technologies.” Franz is being recognized for his development of just-in-time (JIT) compilation techniques that enable fast and feature-rich web services on the internet — services now used by billions of people daily with applications such as Gmail and Facebook.

Franz would have received the prestigious honor at the ACM award banquet on Oct. 23, 2021, but it was cancelled due to the pandemic. Fortunately, ACM put together a series of videos highlighting the achievements of the 2019 and 2020 award recipients that were prepared for the banquet. Here is the video celebrating Franz as the recipient of the 2020 ACM Breakthrough in Computing Award.