Allen Liu is the recipient of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation “Learning Theoretic Foundations for Understanding Quantum Systems,” toward a PhD earned at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Honorable Mentions for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Gal Arnon, for his dissertation “New Advancements in Interactive Oracle Proofs: Theory, Practice, and Limitations,” toward a PhD earned at the Weizmann Institute of Science; and Rachit Nigam for his dissertation “Modular Abstractions for Efficient Hardware Design,” toward a PhD earned at Cornell University.

 Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard received the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing. Their work has influenced cryptography, algorithm design, computational complexity, learning theory, interactive proofs, and mathematical physics, while their research helped catalyze a generation of physicists and computer scientists to work across disciplinary boundaries. Bennett is an American physicist at IBM Research. Brassard is a Canadian computer scientist at the Université de Montréal. 

ACM is pleased to share an important milestone for the computing field. As of January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library have been made open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, more discoverable, and more reusable. This transition is the result of extensive dialogue with authors, SIG leaders, editorial boards, libraries, and research institutions worldwide. ACM is grateful for the community’s consistent advocacy for openness and its commitment to ensuring that computing knowledge is shared widely.

ACM’s recent transition to open access and changes to the ACM Digital Library have sparked considerable community reaction and engagement. ACM President Yannis Ioannidis asks that you please take the time to read his response.

Erdal Arikan, Professor, Bilkent University, receives the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for the discovery of channel polarization and the construction of polar codes—the first explicit, capacity-achieving codes with efficient encoding and decoding adopted in global wireless standards. The transition of polar codes from a profound theoretical milestone to a cornerstone of modern communication infrastructure represents an extraordinary achievement in the field of computing. By bridging the gap between asymptotic theory and practical performance, Arıkan’s discovery moved from academic publication to a global industrial standard within a single decade.

Kevin Leyton-Brown, Professor, University of British Columbia, receives the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence and machine learning, focusing on applications to multiagent systems, heuristic algorithms, social impact, and market design. Leyton-Brown has made numerous significant contributions to artificial intelligence, specifically in the areas of computational economics and game theory and automatedconfiguration/design of algorithms using machine learning.

Ben Mildenhall, co-founder, W orld Labs, and Pratul Srinivasan, Research Scientist, Google DeepMind, are the recipients of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award. They are cited for contributions to radiance field representations, 3D scene capture and rendering, and pioneering neural implicit representations and 3D generative AI. Their contributions underpin widely deployed systems in major products including immersive mapping, 3D commerce, and large-scale scene visualization, and have been adopted across leading technology companies.