The recipient of this year’s Turing Award will also get $250,000, thanks to Google and Intel. And thanks to the recipient’s own genius and “contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community,” of course.
If you look at an official page associated with the Turing Award, you won’t see much – heck, it still says the award comes with just $100,000, and Wikipedia has already been altered to show Google’s and Intel’s contributions. But you will see a list of previous winners, and not far down on that list you’ll see the name “Vinton G. Cerf.”
Cerf now acts as Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist (yes, that’s his official position), and The Register carries a quote from this founding father of the Internet. “Google is proud to provide support for ACM’s Turing Award and its unique role in celebrating innovations in technology that benefit society,” he told Cade Metz.
“Our sponsorship reflects Google’s continuing commitment to foster innovation and facilitate advances in how the world uses information,” Cerf continued. “We look forward to partnering with Intel to help ACM raise awareness of the computing community’s outstanding creativity and the contributions that drive technology breakthroughs.”
And when Cerf says “we,” he may not mean it in a purely corporate sense – Stuart Feldman, who is Google’s vice president of engineering, also acts as president of the ACM.
So it’s sort of a family affair, but the actions of Google and Intel are far from any sort of nepotism; as noted by both Wikipedia and Metz, the Turing Award is widely considered “the Nobel Prize of computing,” and just about everybody benefits from its winners’ actions.
