ACM and Infosys Foundation Announce Winner of New Award Honoring Contemporary Contributions in Computer Science

NEW YORK and Bangalore, INDIA, April 28 /PRNewswire/ --

- US$150,000 Prize to Stanford's Koller for Groundbreaking Work in Making
Computers Intelligent

ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) announced today that Daphne
Koller, a professor at Stanford University, has been awarded the first-ever
ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences. Koller, 39, is being
recognized for her innovative approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) that
allows computers to reason and learn about the world from real-world data. By
combining the previously incompatible tools of logic and probability that are
the basic principles of intelligent reasoning, she created a new field of
learning that has transformed the way computers can process vast amounts of
diverse, uncertain, often-conflicting data to solve complex real-world
problems.

This new award, announced in August 2007, recognizes personal
contributions by young scientists and system developers to a contemporary
innovation that exemplifies the greatest recent achievements in the computing
field. Financial support for the US$150,000 award is provided by an endowment
from the Infosys Foundation.

"Professor Koller's advances have been productive not only for computer
science, but in a wide variety of applications that use computing to advance
society in numerous ways," said Stuart I. Feldman, President of ACM. "Her
research has been used as a framework to solve problems in such diverse
fields as computational biology and epidemiology; language processing
systems; robotics; and computer perception in understanding images. By using
her models and algorithms to integrate small bits and pieces of data in
systematic ways that produce stronger conclusions, her work offers a powerful
way to think about the world. She is an ideal choice for the first recipient
of this award, so generously donated by Infosys," said Feldman, who is vice
president of Engineering at Google Inc.

Koller's research aims to build intelligent systems using techniques that
underlie rational reasoning and learning. It unifies ideas from relational
logic, which involves reasoning about objects and the relationships between
them, and probability, which provides tools for dealing with uncertainty. Her
synthesis of logic and probability is known as probabilistic relational
modeling. She has also developed new mathematical and computational tools
that allow us to learn from complex data the probabilistic rules that model
the world, and to use these rules to reach strong conclusions about the
world.

"The ACM-Infosys Foundation Award recognizes young researchers who are
currently making sizeable contributions to their fields and furthering
computer science innovation. The goal is to identify scientifically-sound
breakthrough research with potentially broad implications, and encourage the
recipients to further their research," said S. Gopalakrishnan, CEO and
managing director, Infosys Technologies. "Daphne Koller is a shining example
of a pioneering researcher whose multi-disciplinary work in artificial
intelligence is enabling computers to operate at a new level and solve
complex problems spanning epidemiology, robotics and language processing
systems."

Koller also heads Stanford's undergraduate research program in computer
science (CS), which she initiated in 2001. It provides summer research
internships to encourage students to get involved in CS research with faculty
mentors early in their careers. To date, nearly three hundred students have
benefited from this program. In 2003, Koller was awarded the Cox Medal for
excellence in fostering undergraduate research at Stanford.

In 2004, Koller was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2001, she received the
Computer and Thought Award from the International Joint Conferences on
Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), and in 1999, she was awarded the
Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Koller has served the computing community in a variety of professional
roles, including Program Chair for the 2007 Conference on Neural Information
Processing Systems (NIPS), and the 2001 Conference on Uncertainty in
Artificial Intelligence. She was associate editor for the Journal of
Artificial Intelligence Research and Machine Learning Journal. She is the
author of more than 150 peer-reviewed articles in publications that span
Science, Nature Genetics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Machine Learning, and Games
and Economic Behavior.

Koller received a B.Sc. in mathematics and a M.Sc. degree in computer
science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. She earned a Ph.D.
degree from Stanford and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of
California, Berkeley. She joined the Stanford faculty in 1995.

ACM will present the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award at the annual ACM
Awards Banquet on June 21, 2008, in San Francisco, CA. For more information,
click on http://www.acm.org/membership/infosys_award.

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery http://www.acm.org, is the
world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting
computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share
resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the computing
profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the
highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the
professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long
learning, career development, and professional networking.

About The Infosys Foundation

Established in 1996, the Infosys Foundation is the philanthropic arm of
Infosys Technologies Ltd. and has the sole objective of fulfilling the social
responsibility of the company by creating opportunities and working toward a
more equitable society. The Infosys Foundation has made effective strides in
the areas of healthcare, education, social rehabilitation, and the arts. The
company contributes up to one percent of its profit to the foundation each
year.

About Infosys Technologies

Infosys (Nasdaq: INFY) defines, designs and delivers IT-enabled business
solutions that help Global 2000 companies win in a Flat World. These
solutions focus on providing strategic differentiation and operational
superiority to clients. With Infosys, clients are assured of a transparent
business partner, world-class processes, speed of execution and the power to
stretch their IT budget by leveraging the Global Delivery Model that Infosys
pioneered. Infosys has over 91,000 employees in over 40 offices worldwide.
Infosys is part of the NASDAQ-100 Index. For more information, visit
http://www.infosys.com.

Web site: http://www.acm.org
              http://www.infosys.com