Cornell professors Joseph Halpern and John Hopcroft were among the winners of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) annual awards for 2008, while Andrew Myers, associate professor of computer science, was honored for work done 10 years ago that is still helping to protect sensitive information.

Halpern, professor of computer science, shared the ACM/Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Allen Newell Award with Barbara Grosz of Harvard University. The award and prize of $10,000 recognizes career contributions in computer science or that bridge computer science and other disciplines.

Halpern was honored for advances in reasoning about knowledge, belief and uncertainty when parties are communicating and have both certain and uncertain knowledge. His research has led to applications in artificial intelligence, computer science, game theory, economics and the philosophy of science, and he has made major contributions to ACM publications.

Hopcroft, the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Computer Science, received the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, which recognizes educators who advanced new teaching methodologies, effected new curricula in computer science and engineering or contributed to ACM's educational mission. Hopcroft has co-authored several widely used computer science texts. He has worked to improve science and technology education in such developing countries as Vietnam and Chile.

Hopcroft served as chair of the Department of Computer Science, 1987-92, and as the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering, 1994-2001.

Myers received the ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) Paper Award. The award is presented annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at the POPL symposium held 10 years prior to the award year, judged by its influence over the past decade. The award was for his 1999 paper, "JFlow: Practical Mostly-Static Information Flow Control." Myers demonstrated a way to protect privacy and preserve integrity by an extension of the Java language that has been widely applied in the development of other programming languages and led to confidentiality guarantees in new real-world systems.