Global Infosys award coming

BANGALORE: Infosys Technologies will set up a global annual award for computing excellence with a cash prize of $150,000.

The award, proposed to be instituted through the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), will dwarf the Turing Award, the existing highest recognition for computing in the world and referred to by some as the Nobel Prize for excellence in computing and technical research.

Infosys will offer a corpus of $4 million to ACM, the New York-based non-profit organisation of computing experts, researchers, scientists, innovators and educators. The award will be given out of the interest earned from the fund. The recognition, to be called Infosys Award, will be conferred on the global winner every year in Bangalore. Infosys declined to comment.

The Turing Award, funded by Intel Corporation, carries a cash prize of $100,000. Sources say with Infosys funding an award with a bigger cash bag, Intel may increase its funding so that ACM would be able to match the prize money of the Turing Award to that of the proposed Infosys Award.

"ACM will then have two prestigious global awards with prize money of $150,000 each to honour excellence in computing, research and technical innovations," said a source. For Infosys, the award is expected to help in brand building in the world of computing.

ACM instituted the Turing Award in 1947 in honour of Alan Mathison Turing, the British mathematician who contributed the mathematical foundation and limits of computing. Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj Reddy", a renowned researcher in artificial intelligence and robotics from Katoor in TN, is the only Indian to receive the Turing Award. Raj Reddy was the head of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Lab in Carnegie Mellon University, US.