Association for Computing Machinery selects Pinar, Phillips as distinguished members

LIVERMORE, Calif. — Sandia National Laboratories scientists Ali Pinar and Cynthia (Cindy) Phillips have been selected as distinguished members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Sandia National Laboratories scientist Ali Pinar has been selected as distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery. (Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

ACM, the world’s leading association of computing professionals, selected Pinar and Phillips for their significant accomplishments and impact within the computing field. ACM recently selected 49 members for this recognition in the areas of education, engineering and science.

Pinar, principal member of the technical staff, centers his work on applying graph algorithms to real-world problems. He has worked on combinatorial problems arising in parallel and scientific computing, electric power systems and data, especially graph mining. He first joined Sandia as an intern in 1999, while he was working towards his doctorate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since rejoining Sandia in 2008, he focused on modeling and analysis of graphs and using sampling and streaming algorithms for massive data sets. This recent work has received three best paper prizes from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), ACM and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Pinar is a member of SIAM, IEEE and the Institute for Operations Research and the  Management Sciences. He serves a member of the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, SIAM News and Journal of Complex Networks.

Sandia National Laboratories scientist Cynthia Phillips has been selected as distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery. (Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Phillips, a senior scientist in Sandia’s Center for Computing Research, conducts research in combinatorial optimization, algorithm design and analysis and parallel computation. She has applied these techniques to many areas including scheduling, network and infrastructure surety, integer programming, graph algorithms, computational biology, quantum computing, computer security, wireless network management, social network analysis/graph data mining, sensor placement and co-design of algorithms for next-generation architectures.

She received a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Harvard University and a doctorate in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been at Sandia since 1990. She has chaired seven major international meetings and served on more than 60 program committees. In particular, she has served on the program committee for at least 20 ACM conferences, including chairing their flagship parallel algorithms conference, the ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures. She also served as a conference officer.

The distinguished members are selected from leading academic institutions and corporate and national research laboratories around the world. This year, ACM selected distinguished members from Argentina, Belgium, Canada, China, Egypt, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Portugal, Qatar, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corp., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Michael Padilla, mjpadil@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447