Since 2009, the Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing (also called SIROCCO award) has been presented annually at the conference “International Colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity (SIROCCO)” to an individual (or individuals) who have made a major contribution to understanding the relationships between information and efficiency in decentralized computing, which is main area of interest for the SIROCCO conference. The award recognizes innovation, in particular, it recognizes inventors of new ideas that were unorthodox and outside the mainstream at the time of their introduction.
Prof. Dr. Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide, since 1989 Head of the Algorithms and Complexity Group at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute of the Paderborn University and Chairman of the Board of CRC 901, is the sole recipient of the SIROCCO Award this year. In particular, the prize is awarded for his contributions to continuous strategies for swarms of mobile robots, but Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide has been an active contributor to the field of Distributed Computing since its very beginning, with pioneering contributions to online scheduling problems, load balancing, distributed data structures, hashing, network routing, mobile facility location and distributed data streams. Not only has he produced excellent research on distributed computing, but has also inspired and mentored several young researchers some of whom are now well-established scientists in this field. He is (co-) author of over 200 publications and several patents. To date, over 50 doctorates supervised by him have been completed, and 14 of his students now hold professorships.
We sincerely congratulate Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide for this prestigious award!
For more informations see https://sirocco2021.ii.uni.wroc.pl/2021-sirocco-prize/
