The Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing is awarded by the Colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity (SIROCCO). It is established to recognize individuals whose research contributions on the relationships between information and efficiency in decentralized computing have expanded the collective investigative horizon by formulating new problems, or identifying new research areas, that were at the time of their introduction unorthodox and outside the mainstream. The prize recognizes originality, innovation, and creativity.

The prize is given to Nicola Santoro for his overall contribution on the analysis of the labeled graph properties which has been shown to have a significant impact on computability and complexity in systems of communicating entities.
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By his results and ideas, Nicola Santoro has enriched Distributed Computing considerably, providing innovative concepts at the source of an extremely large number of current investigations, ranging from compact routing to mobile computing. His pioneering investigations of distributed computing in labeled networks are among the most influential ones, and have opened a vast domains of promising researches, aiming at capturing and understanding the central notion of "local knowledge".
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He is the author of the book "Design and Analysis of Distributed Algorithms" (Wiley, 2007). Quoting the introduction: "My own experience as well as that of my students leads to the inescapable conclusion that both to teach and to learn distributed algorithms are fun". Those of us who had the opportunity to work with Nicola Santoro are the witnesses that it is not the least of his contributions to have made this conclusion a fact.

• Pierre Fraigniaud (CNRS and University Paris Diderot)
• Leszek Gasieniec (University of Liverpool)
• David Peleg (Weizmann Institute)
• Alexander A. Shvartsman (University of Connecticut/MIT)
• Shmuel Zaks (Technion)