The ‘Best of Swiss Web’ honorary award committee is presenting this year’s honorary award to Dr. Urs Hölzle whose passion for IT has inspired people all over the world and has resulted in pioneering IT developments in a number of companies. In his capacity as first Vice President and Chief Engineer of Google, Urs oversaw the development of Google’s original technical infrastructure, thereby making a substantial contribution to the success of the global enterprise. Urs Hölzle is one of the best-known and most influential IT specialists worldwide – a worthy honorary award winner in the ‘Best of Swiss Web’ competition.
Having grown up and completed his schooling in Liestal in the Canton of Basel-Landschaft, Urs Hölzle went on to study IT at ETH Zurich. He followed his masters degree with a Fulbright PhD scholarship at Stanford University, California. As one of the pioneers of ‘just-in-time compilation’, an essential basic process for the Java Compiler, he was soon offered a professorship at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). In 1996, he received the Career Award of the renowned National Science Foundation in recognition of his work on high-performance implementation of object-oriented programming languages.
In 1999, Urs Hölzle became the 8th member on the team of Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s Google start-up. Today, he is the Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure & Google Fellow responsible for, among other aspects, the design and operation of the networks and data centres for all Google services as well as the development of the software infrastructure required by Google applications. The top-efficient data centres and servers that were developed under his direction consume substantially less energy than other computer centres, which is one of the reasons why Urs Hölzle is also a member of the US World Wildlife Fund management.
On top of this, the ‘Cloud Guy with the red socks’ has authored numerous research papers and US patents. He is also a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW) and, the latest feather in his cap, a ‘Best of Swiss Web’ honorary award winner.
The ‘Best of Swiss Web’ honorary award
The ‘Best of Swiss Web’ is Europe’s oldest surviving internet and mobile award. Aside from regular project winners, the honorary award committee, consisting of the individual categories’ twelve panel chairmen and the ‘Best of Swiss Web’ steering committee, selects one honorary award winner each year.
The award is presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the development of the internet and the ICT sector in the form of fundamental technical developments or exceptional entrepreneurial, political or research activities.
5 April 2016
