Special Awards
The special award was established in 1954 for the purpose of recognizing a public figure (a government or industry leader) for long-term contributions to the advancement of information science and technology which have resulted in public awareness of the field and its benefits to society.
Past recipients of the Special Award:
| 2004 | Tim Berners Lee (In recognition of his unprecedented work in fathering the World Wide Web, and his work in maintaining the Web universal document identifiers, as open source, royalty-free, platform independent, and governed with distributed authority) |
| 1998 | Herbert A. Simon (Contributions to computer science, artificial intelligence, psychology, economics, philosophy, human problem solving, cognitive science and numeral other fields) |
| 1996 | Douglas C. Engelbart (Consistent efforts to augment human intelligence) |
| 1995 | Gerard O. Platau (30 years continuous service to the ASIS Board) |
| 1993 | Vinton Cerf and Robert E. Hahn (Seminal Contributions to the Internet Communications Network) |
| 1991 | Senator Albert Gore, Jr. (Public Policy Achievement) |
| 1987 | Rep. George E. Brown, Jr. (Public Policy Achievements) |
| 1982 | Scott Adams (Special Recognition Award) |
| 1978 | Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (posthumously) |
| 1976 | Marc Porat (Special Bicentennial Fellowship) |
| 1968 | Isaac Asimov (Distinguished Service Award) |
| 1954 | Atherton Seidell |