Saman Amarasinghe to Receive ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award
October 15, 2025
ACM and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS) have named Saman Amarasinghe, Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as the recipient of the 2025 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. The Ken Kennedy Award recognizes groundbreaking achievements in parallel and high-performance computing. Amarasinghe is cited for fundamental contributions pioneering high-performance domain-specific languages, exceptional mentorship, and service advancing the global computing community.
Amarasinghe leads the Commit compiler research group in MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Born in Sri Lanka and schooled at Royal College, Colombo, he is a graduate of Cornell University and earned his Master’s and PhD degrees from Stanford University. He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2019.
ACM and the IEEE Computer Society co-sponsor the Kennedy Award, which was established in 2009 to recognize substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and significant community service or mentoring contributions. It was named for the late Ken Kennedy, founder of Rice University’s computer science program and a world expert on high-performance computing. The Kennedy Award carries a US $5,000 honorarium endowed by IEEE CS and ACM.
