The Association for Computing Machinery named Harvard's Leslie Valiant the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award for "his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science."

"Valiant brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and computer vision. He also launched several subfields of theoretical computer science, and developed models for parallel computing."

The Turing Award is considered to be the computing's “Nobel Prize" and carries a $250,000 prize.