Four Professors Recognized with Test of Time Awards

Every year, leading conferences across computer science honor research that has stood the test of time—work that continues to shape the field years, or even decades, after its original publication. In 2025, several professors have earned this distinguished recognition, highlighting the lasting influence of their contributions across data management, hardware design, and theoretical computer science.

At SIGMOD/PODS 2025, the Test of Time Award was presented to John Paparrizos and Luis Gravano for their 2015 paper k-shape: Efficient and Accurate Clustering of Time Series, which remains a cornerstone in time series analysis.

At the 62nd Design Automation Conference (DAC ’25), Luca P. Carloni, Kenneth L. McMillan, and Alberto L. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli were honored with the A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation for their seminal 1999 work on Latency Insensitive Protocols, a foundational concept that continues to influence the design of robust, modular hardware systems.

At the 57th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC ’25), Cynthia Dwork, Vitaly Feldman, Moritz Hardt, Toniann Pitassi, Omer Reingold, and Aaron Leon Roth received the 10-Year Test of Time Award for their 2015 paper Preserving Statistical Validity in Adaptive Data Analysis, a breakthrough that reshaped our understanding of privacy and validity in machine learning.

And at the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P ’25), Yinzhi Cao and Junfeng Yang won a Test of Time Award for their 2015 paper, Towards Making Systems Forget with Machine Unlearning, for introducing the concept of ‘machine unlearning’—the idea that models should efficiently forget specific training data upon request, rather than retrain from scratch, to support privacy, security, and usability.