Google has dramatically boosted the A.M. Turing Award. The search engine giant has upped the prize money to the winner of the computing award to $1 million, putting it on par with the Nobel Peace Prize and major awards in other fields. The first million dollar recipient will be named in early 2015.
The A.M. Turing Award recipient is determined annually and is given to “an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community”. The award is widely considered the highest distinction in Computer science. Awards have been handed out since 1966.
“The Turing Award is now funded at the monetary level of the world’s most prestigious cultural and scientific awards and prizes,” said ACM President Alexander Wolf. “With the generous support of Google, we can celebrate the mainstream role of computing in transforming the world and the way we communicate, conduct business, and access entertainment. We can also commemorate the pioneering, fundamental contributions of our ACM Turing Award recipients in advancing computing as a science and a profession.”
Few of the award winners are household names, but all have contributed greatly to computing science. Awards have been given across all aspects of computer science including networking, programming language development, and hardware design. The last boost was given in 2006, and was then co-sponsored by Intel and Google.