The Mark Weiser Award 2021

The Mark Weiser Award was created in 2001 by ACM SIGOPS, to be given to an individual who has demonstrated creativity and innovation in operating systems research. The award is named in honor of Mark Weiser, a computing visionary recognized for his research accomplishments during his career at Xerox PARC. The award committee for 2021 consisted of Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Eddie Kohler.

The winner of the 2021 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award is

Michael Freedman

From the nominations letters:

“One of the world’s top systems researchers and one of the people who are reshaping the entire field of distributed computing”

“Has had impact across multiple areas of systems, networking, and security, and has led to systems touching millions of users and having major impact across an entire industry”

“Combines deep knowledge and creativity to develop systems that
successfully address scaling, security, and performance — especially in geodistributed settings”

“Their work is a breakthrough because it, for the first time, provides a
scalable way to implement the strongest possible consistency that can be enforced in a highly available and partition-resilient system”

The award was announced Wednesday, October 27th at the ACM SIGOPS Award Ceremony at SOSP 2021.