Marcelo Arenas is distinguished as an ACM Fellow

January, 2025.- The Association for Computing Machinery, the most prestigious organization in the field of computing and computer science worldwide, recognized Marcelo Arenas, academic at the Department of Computer Science UC and the Institute of Mathematical and Computational Engineering UC, and IMFD researcher, as a Fellow of the ACM. This award recognizes the top 1% of ACM members for their contributions to computer science and technology, based on their track record, quality, and the impact of their research.

“I receive this recognition very happy, very pleased, because this organization is the most important in computing in the world, and this is the highest honor it gives to its members,” says Marcelo Arenas, who receives this appointment for his important contributions in the area of foundations of data management.

“Information technology has had a tremendous impact on the way we live and work today,” said ACM President Yannis Ioannidis. “The ACM Fellows program honors the creativity and hard work of ACM members whose specific achievements drive innovation and make broader advances possible. By announcing a new class of Fellows each year, we celebrate the impact of some of the pioneers of our community and highlight the numerous technical areas of computing in which they work.” The 55 selected members of 2024 are outstanding ACM members whose achievements were selected by their peers for making possible the computing technologies we use today.

Only five Latin Americans: three are IMFD

With this recognition, Arenas becomes the third IMFD researcher to achieve this: the first Latin American ACM Fellow (2009) is Ricardo Baeza Yates, current Director of Research at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. In 2023 the recognition highlighted the career and work of Gonzalo Navarro, academic at the Department of Computer Science of the Universidad de Chile: all three are researchers at the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), and together with Luiz Andre Barroso (2010) and Carlos de Lucena (2013), both Brazilian researchers, are part of the select group of five Latin American scientists who have obtained it.

For Juan Reutter, director of the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), “This recognition undoubtedly highlights Marcelo’s work, which has been crucial for the development of both IMFD and the field at the national and international level. Moreover, the fact that three of the five Latin American researchers who have received this recognition are part of IMFD fills us with pride, and confirms the direction we have taken at the institute, always with collaboration and excellence as our goals.”

“Looking at the research we do in Chile, it is possible to see that we have a niche, in the formation of which Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Gonzalo Navarro, and fellow IMFD researcher Leopoldo Bertossi played an important part, as they were the ones who began forming groups that ended up working in very specific areas, such as databases, and in which we managed to highlight the work done in Chile on a global level,” adds Arenas.

A career devoted to computer science

Marcelo Arenas is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Institute of Mathematical and Computational Engineering of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Former director of IMFD and of the Center for Semantic Web Research, he holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto (Canada), and his areas of interest are data management, applications of logic in computer science, and the semantic web. He has participated as an invited expert at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and according to Google Scholar, his articles have received 12,165 citations.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, bringing together educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the challenges of the field. ACM strengthens the collective voice of computing work through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by offering them lifelong learning opportunities, professional development, and professional networking. The ACM Fellows Program, launched in 1993, celebrates the exceptional contributions of the leading members in the field of computing. These individuals have helped illuminate researchers, developers, professionals, and end users of information technologies around the world. New ACM Fellows join a distinguished list of colleagues to whom ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership in computing and information technologies.

ACM has previously recognized Marcelo Arenas’ work: in 2021 he was named an ACM “Distinguished Member,” and highlighted the academic in its “People of ACM” section, which selects Association members whose scientific achievements have made a difference in advancing computing as a science and profession, and in this interview, they highlighted Arenas’ professional career as well as his personal story.