Vipin Kumar Wins IEEE Computer Society Taylor L Booth Education Award
Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) Regents Professor Vipin Kumar has been awarded the 2025 IEEE Computer Society Taylor L. Booth Education Award. Kumar was selected for his contributions to computational science and engineering through his foundational textbooks, outstanding mentoring, and exceptional scientific leadership.
Kumar is world-renowned for his research in artificial intelligence, data science, and high-performance computing. He has played a pioneering role in bringing “big data” and earth sciences together to address one of the grand challenges of times—understanding the impact of human-induced changes on the Earth and its environment. Textbooks co-authored by him, titled "Introduction to Parallel Computing" and "Introduction to Data Mining," are used worldwide and have played a defining educational role in two major areas in computer science.
“Vipin is an outstanding mentor to students at all levels,” said Mats Heimdahl, professor and CS&E department head. “His former students have gone on to highly successful careers in academia and industry.”
Kumar’s notable mentees include Jeff Dean, Google’s Chief Scientist and member of the National Academy of Engineering, who recently endowed a $500,000 scholarship fund honoring Dr. Vipin Kumar to support undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota.
Kumar’s wide ranging contributions have been recognized in the past with the 2012 ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award (the highest award for technical excellence in the field of knowledge discovery and data mining), the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award (one of IEEE Computer Society's highest awards in high-performance computing), and a test-of-time award from 2021 Supercomputing Conference (SC21) for his work on graph partitioning.
The Taylor L. Booth Education Award is given to individuals who have an outstanding record in computer science and engineering education, as established by some of the following criteria: achieving recognition as a teacher of renown in a relevant and applicable course; writing an influential text; leading, inspiring, or providing significant educational content during the creation of a curriculum in the field; and inspiring others to a career in computer science and engineering education. The award consists of a bronze medal and $5,000 honorarium.