The Association for Computing Machinery has selected Mor Harchol-Balter and Venkatesan Guruswami, both professors in the Computer Science Department, as ACM Fellows in recognition of their major contributions to computer science.

They are among 54 members of the 2017 class of ACM fellows, including MIT’s Shafi Goldwasser, a CMU alumna and Turing Award recipient. They join 33 current and former CMU faculty members previously named as fellows.

''To be selected as a fellow is to join our most renowned member grade and an elite group that represents less than 1 percent of ACM’s overall membership,'' said ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. ''The fellows program allows us to shine a light on landmark contributions to computing, as well as the men and women whose tireless efforts, dedication, and inspiration are responsible for groundbreaking work that improves our lives in so many ways.''

The ACM cited Guruswami ''for contributions to algorithmic coding theory, pseudorandomness and the complexity of approximate optimization.'' His research spans a number of additional topics in theoretical computer science, including the theory of error-correcting codes, probabilistically checkable proofs, computational complexity theory, and algebraic algorithms. He joined the faculty in 2009.

The ACM cited Harchol-Balter ''for contributions to performance modeling and analysis of distributed computing systems.'' Her work on designing new resource allocation policies includes load balancing policies, power management policies, and scheduling policies for distributed systems. She is heavily involved in the SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE research community and is the author of a popular textbook, Performance Analysis and Design of Computer Systems. She joined the faculty in 1999.

ACM will formally recognize its 2017 fellows at its annual awards banquet in San Francisco on June 23, 2018. Additional information about these and previous fellows and the awards event is available at http://awards.acm.org.