'Nobel prize for computer science' is officially awarded
Source: Sara Castellanos

Just days after Michael Stonebraker landed $25 million in new funding for his startup, he was also given the Turing Award at a ceremony in San Francisco on Sunday.

The award is considered by many in the field to be the equivalent of the "Nobel Prize for computer science."

Stonebraker is a researcher at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a serial entrepreneur whose latest big data endeavor, Tamr, just landed new investor funding.




From left: ACM President Alexander L. Wolf, Google Distinguished Scientist Andrei Z. Broder, 2014 ACM A.M. Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker and ACM CEO John R. White.


Scott Sbiley Photo International

Big data forefather Michael Stonebraker receives $1M Turing Award

A 71-year-old Boston resident, Stonebraker spent the past 40 years working in the field of database management, now known as big data, which refers to a range of data, data types and tools to address the massive amounts of rapidly growing information that organizations around the world are handling.

He began his research in the early 1970s while he was an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the years, database management has been used in a variety of ways by countless companies and organizations that desire a way to organize and leverage data.

"Very big amounts of data have been in data warehouses for a long time. What's new is that the rest of the world is realizing they've got a big data problem ... and data management techniques are the way to address it," Stonebraker said in a previous interview.