Two School of Information faculty have been honored with one of the highest recognitions in the field of computing. Professor Clifford Lampe and Associate Professor Eytan Adar have been named Distinguished Members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest and most prestigious association of computing professionals. The ACM Distinguished Member program only recognizes up to ten percent of ACM membership worldwide, based on professional experience as well as significant achievements in the computing field. 

Clifford Lampe was recognized for Outstanding Scientific Contributions to Computing. Lampe has been a member of the UMSI faculty since 2011 and received his doctorate from the School of Information in 2006. He researches the social and technical structures of large-scale technology mediated communication, working with sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, Slashdot and Everything2. He has also been involved in the creation of multiple social media and online community projects, usually designed to enable collective action. 

In June, 2018 Lampe was elected Executive Vice President for the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI).

Eytan Adar has been recognized for Outstanding Contributions to Computing.  Adar joined the UMSI faculty in 2009 He received his PhD from the University of Washington and prior to graduate school he worked as a researcher at HP Labs’ Information Dynamics Group and at Xerox PARC.  

His work is at the boundary of Human-Computer Interaction and Data Mining. Specific research projects range from modeling behaviors at a very large-scale (search, social networks evolution, learning, meme and rumor spread, programming, text production and consumption, etc.) and applying those models to constructing better HCI systems. This is primarily at Internet scales and includes research in the areas of text and log mining, visualizations, and social network analysis. In addition to his position at the School of Information, he is also an associate professor of Computer Science in the College of Engineering at Michigan. 

“By honoring these individuals, we highlight the professional achievements behind the technologies that have transformed both our daily lives and society in general,” explains ACM President Cherri M. Pancake. “Each Distinguished Member has also demonstrated a commitment to being part of the professional community through his or her longstanding membership in ACM. These computing leaders really epitomize ACM’s mission of ‘advancing computing as a science and profession.’”

- UMSI News Service