Two University of Melbourne experts honoured by world’s pre-eminent computing society

L: Professor Alistair Moffat (Image by Reyhaneh Goli) and R: Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Rajkumar Buyya

Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Rajkumar Buyya and Professor Alistair Moffat have been named Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2025 Fellows – one of the highest honours for the computing field.

ACM is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue and address the field's challenges. This year’s 71 honourees were selected from over 100,000 computing professionals, with the set of Fellows representing the top one per cent of professionals in ACM.

Professor Buyya was recognised for his research contributions to cost and energy-efficient resource management and scheduling systems for cloud computing. Professor Moffat was recognised for his contributions to the implementation and evaluation of search engines.

Head of the School of Computing and Information Systems, Professor Uwe Aickelin said he was delighted to see the two recognised for “their contributions to computing innovation and impact”.

“Their work has benefited cloud computing and search engine design globally. They are inspirational teachers and amazing colleagues in our School and with their collaborators around the world,” Professor Aickelin said.

“Their success follows Pro Vice-Chancellor (Graduate and International Research) Redmond Barry Professor Justin Zobel being named an ACM Fellow in 2024. We now boast three ACM Fellows in our midst – a record for Australia.”

An expert in distributed, grid and cloud computing, Professor Buyya is Director of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory. He is also founding CEO of Manjrasoft, a spin-off company of the University, commercialising its innovations in cloud computing. Software technologies for grid and cloud computing developed under his leadership are in use at academic institutions, and commercial enterprises in over 50 countries.

A former Head of the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Professor Moffat has extensive research interests in text and index compression, source coding methods, web search and information retrieval. He is also widely recognised for his teaching excellence and is now in his fortieth year of service at the University.