McDowell Award 2017

LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 04 May 2017 - Srinivas Devadas, the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been selected to receive the IEEE Computer Society 2017 W. Wallace McDowell Award "for fundamental contributions that have shaped the field of secure hardware, impacting circuits, microprocessors, and systems.”

Devadas's research interests span Computer-Aided Design (CAD), computer security and computer architecture and he has received significant awards in each discipline. An IEEE and ACM Fellow, Devadas received the ACM/IEEE Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation in 2015, and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award in 2014 for his work on secure hardware.

His 2004 work on processor-level information flow tracking received the ASPLOS Most Influential Paper Award in 2014. His papers on analytical cache modeling and the Aegis single-chip secure processor are included as influential papers in "25 Years of the International Conference on Supercomputing."

Devadas joined the MIT EECS faculty in 1988 and served as Associate Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, with responsibility for Computer Science, from 2005 to 2011.

Devadas and his students invented silicon Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) in 2002. PUFs are the technological basis of the founding of Verayo, a company focused on improving the security of computer hardware. PUFs have been incorporated into products as diverse as Xilinx's system-on-chip field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to enable secure boot to RFID tags that are used to combat counterfeiting in commercial products such as Canon cameras.

Devadas has taught widely in EECS, lecturing classes in VLSI, discrete mathematics, computer architecture, algorithms and software engineering.  He is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow and an Everett Moore Baker teaching award recipient, considered MIT's two highest undergraduate teaching honors.

He received his Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1985, and his MS and PhD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986 and 1988, respectively.

The McDowell Award is given to individuals for outstanding recent theoretical, design, educational, practical, or other innovative contributions in the field of computing. The award may be given for a single contribution of great merit or a series of lesser contributions that have had or are expected to have an important influence on the computer field.

The award consists of a bronze medal and a $2,000 honorarium.  The award will be presented at the Computer Society annual awards ceremony to be held on Wednesday, 14 June 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

One of computing’s most prestigious individual honors, the W. Wallace McDowell Award has a list of past winners that reads like a who’s who of industry leaders. They include FORTRAN creator John W. Backus (1967); supercomputer pioneers Seymour Cray (1968), Gene Amdahl (1976), and Ken Kennedy (1995); the architect of IBM’s mainframe computer Frederick Brooks (1970); Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore (1978); Donald Knuth, the father of algorithm analysis (1980); microprocessor inventor Federico Faggin (1994); World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee (1996); Lotus Notes creator and Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie (2000); and IBM Fellow Ronald Fagin (2012).

Learn more about the McDowell Award, including a complete list of past recipient.