Matej Zaharia wins 2025 ACM Computing Award

Matej Zaharia, co-founder and CTO of Databricks, received the 2025 ACM Computing Award for his “visionary development of distributed data systems and computing infrastructure that has enabled large-scale machine learning, analytics, and AI on a global scale.”

The ACM Computing Prize, funded by a gift from Infosys Ltd and awarded with a prize of $250,000, was established in 2007 to recognize:

”of During his early to mid-career, he made fundamental innovative contributions in computing, and through his depth, impact, and far-reaching impact, he exemplified the field’s greatest achievements. ”

The 2025 edition of the award goes to Matej Zaharia, who, in addition to his role as Databricks’ CTO, is also an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley. It was a Ph.D. I learned that Zaharia was a student at Berkeley in 2009 when he started developing Apache Spark, which takes a distributed computing approach that uses memory to speed up computations. This design makes Spark dramatically faster than existing frameworks for the iterative computations essential to machine learning, while its unified architecture allows for batch processing, streaming, graph computation, and interactive queries within a single system.

Spark, an open source project, rose from research to widespread use and is now one of the most widely used frameworks for large-scale data analysis, deployed by tens of thousands of organizations and integrated into major cloud platforms.

Zaharia has worked on other widely used data and AI software, including Delta Lake, MLflow, Dolly, and ColBERT, and is currently focused on AI development, specifically researching how to build and scale trusted agents.

According to ACM:

Zaharia’s research has addressed a central challenge in computing: how to process and analyze rapidly growing amounts of data efficiently and at a scale previously accessible only to the largest technology companies. Early distributed data systems had limited speed and were poorly suited for emerging workloads such as machine learning and interactive analytics. Zaharia has transformed what organizations can do with large datasets through a series of open source systems, each targeting a different bottleneck.

Comments from ACM President Giannis Ioannidis

“Matej Zaharia’s work has had a lasting impact on how we use data at scale. By addressing the key limitations of previous systems, he developed technology that quickly became standard tools for data analysis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Matej’s open source philosophy was essential. He made these tools available to everyone. His contributions continue to influence both research and industry, and AI I look forward to seeing where his current work on systems takes us next.”

Salil Parekh, CEO of Infosys, which is funding the award, added:

“Matej’s contributions have helped define the way today’s organizations work with data and AI. His systems are widely used across the industry, enabling teams to more effectively build, deploy, and scale AI applications.”

Zaharia will be formally awarded the ACM Computing Award on June 13th at the annual ACM Awards Banquet in San Francisco.

Detailed information

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