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Alexandra Meliou, professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), has been named a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), one of the organization’s highest recognitions for technical excellence and impact.

The ACM Distinguished Member grade honors computing professionals with at least 15 years of experience who have achieved significant accomplishments or leadership in the field, and Meliou was recognized for her extensive contributions to the foundations and design of understandable, trustworthy and usable data systems.

Her research has advanced multiple areas of data management, as her work on causality and explanations introduced influential models and algorithms that help users understand how data influences query results and system behavior. She has also played a leading role in fairness-aware software engineering, developing methods to detect discriminatory behaviors in software systems and techniques for selecting diverse, balanced datasets that mitigate algorithmic bias. 

Her contributions to in-database prescriptive analytics—including new abstractions and scalable algorithms for evaluating complex, constraint-based queries—have expanded the range of decision-making tasks that database systems can support efficiently.

More information about Meliou’s ACM recognition can be found on the CICS news site.