CCC Council Member Shwetak Patel Receives ACM Prize in Computing

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced it’s 2018 Prize in Computing award to Shwetak Patel, of the University of Washington and Google and a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member.  The ACM Prize in Computing is their second most prestigious award in all of computing (after the Turing Award – known as the Nobel Prize in Computing).  Patel is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Prize in Computing for contributions to creative and practical sensing systems for sustainability and health.  In just a decade, he has had incredible impact in the applications of AI and sensing in two broad areas – developing methods for disaggregating energy and water usage in the home and developing new methods of health sensing and advancing clinical science through the use of commodity sensors.

Patel is an American Computer Scientist of Indian heritage, who went to high school in Alabama and earned his Bachelor’s and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.  He is a Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, and also a Director at Google.  On the CCC, Patel co-leads the Health and Human Computer Interaction Task Force and is currently planning a visioning activity on mental health and addiction.

Patel is the co-author of over 100 scholarly publications in a wide range of areas including human computer interaction, mobile computing, ubiquitous computing, medicine, and medical engineering with over 15,000 citations.  His numerous research awards include a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, a Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) Award, a Sloan Fellowship, a Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, a MIT TR-35 award, a National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Gilbreth Award, a World Economic Forum Young Global Scientist Award, and numerous Best Paper awards at conferences such as the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and the ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. Patel is an ACM Fellow.

Congratulations, Shwetak!