Honorary award winner "Best of Swiss Web" 2016 is Urs Hölzle
The «Best of Swiss Web» Honorary Award Committee is presenting this year’s Honorary Award to Urs Hölzle, who has inspired people around the world with his passion for computer science and has made pioneering contributions to information technology at various companies.
As Google's first vice-president and chief engineer, he led the further development of Google's original technical infrastructure - and thus played a major role in the global company's success. Urs Hölzle is one of the best-known and most influential computer scientists in the world - and thus a deserving honorary award winner, according to a "Best of Swiss Web" release.
Urs Hölzle, who grew up in Liestal, Basellandschaft, studied computer science at ETH Zurich after finishing school. After completing his master's degree, he earned his doctorate as a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University in California. As one of the pioneers of "just-in-time compilation", without which today's Java compilers would not be possible, he was soon a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). In recognition of his work on high-performance implementations of object-oriented programming languages, he was awarded the Career Award of the prestigious National Science Foundation in 1996.
In 1999, Urs Hölzle joined Larry Page and Sergey Brin's start-up company Google as the eighth employee. Today, as Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure & Google Fellow, his responsibilities include the design and operation of networks and data centers for all Google services, as well as the development of the software infrastructure used by Google's applications. The highly efficient data centers and servers developed under his leadership use significantly less energy than other data centers; this is one reason why Urs Hölzle is also a board member of the US World Wildlife Fund.
In addition, Urs Hölzle, as the "Cloud Guy with the red socks", has written numerous scientific papers and US patents and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) as well as a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW) and newly - honorary laureate of "Best of Swiss Web".
The "Best of Swiss Web" honorary award
"Best of Swiss Web" is the oldest still existing Internet and Mobile Award in Europe. In addition to the regular project winners, the Honorary Award Jury, which is made up of the twelve jury presidents of the individual categories as well as the Steering Board of "Best of Swiss Web" - selects the respective winner of the Honorary Award once a year.
This prize is awarded to individuals who have made a special contribution to the development of the Internet and the ICT industry. For example, through fundamental developments in the technical field or extraordinary achievements as an entrepreneur, politician or researcher.
Previous honorary award winners (excerpt):
- 2007: Dr. Fulvio Caccia (former Director of Comcom)
- 2008: David Nüscheler (CTO and Co-Founder, Day, now Adobe)
- 2009: Christian Wanner (CEO, Le Shop)
- 2010: Robert Cailliau (co-inventor WWW, CERN)
- 2011: Marc Bürki and Paolo Buzzi (Founder and Managing Director Swissquote)
- 2012: Beat Schmid (Founder IWI, University of St. Gallen)
- 2013: Switch Foundation (among others Bernhard Plattner, founder Switch)
- 2014: Bea Knecht (Founder and Chairman of the Board of Zattoo)
- 2015: Marcel Dobler, Oliver Herren, Florian Teuteberg (Founders of Digitec.ch)
The award will be presented in a festive setting at the award night of "Best of Swiss Web" on Thursday, April 7, 2016 (17:30 - approx. 22:00), at the Kongresshaus Zurich.
