Doctoral Dissertation Award Recognizes Young Researchers
Ashish Sharma is the recipient of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation “Human-AI Collaboration to Support Mental Health and Well Being.” Sharma developed fundamental advances in natural language processing to positively impact the mental health of many people. Honorable Mentions go to Alexander (Zander) Kelley for his dissertation “Explicit Pseudorandom Distributions for Restricted Models of Computation” toward a PhD earned at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Sewon Min for her dissertation “Rethinking Data Use in Large Language Models” toward a PhD earned at the University of Washington.
ACM Reaffirms Its Commitment to Our Mission and Core Values
ACM is aware that many in our community are concerned about potential negative effects of recent Executive Orders by the new US Administration on our work in both the US and globally. This includes concerns about possible consequences for ACM publishing, conferences, education, and practitioner efforts, as well as concerns about possible harms to our work on inclusion for a strong and diverse technology workforce.
ACM reaffirms its commitment to our mission and core values in all our scientific and educational activities. This includes global scientific and educational efforts dedicated to advancing the art, science, engineering, and application of computing. We will continue to serve both professional and public interests by fostering the open exchange of information and by promoting the highest professional and ethical standards.
ACM’s commitment to its mission, guided by its core values, is unchanged. We will work with members of the community to understand how new Executive Orders may affect their work as it relates to scientific, educational, and community development efforts.
CACM Relaunched as Open Access, Web-First Publication
ACM has relaunched Communications of the ACM (CACM) as a web-first publication, accessible to all without charge—including the entire backlog of CACM articles. First published in 1958, CACM is one of the most respected information technology magazines. The web-first model will allow ACM to publish articles more rapidly than before so that readers can keep abreast of the lightning-fast changes in the computing field. At the same time, researchers will be able to reference and cite valuable information and research from CACM articles more quickly. This marks another important milestone in ACM's ongoing transition to a fully open access publisher.
A Rewarding Line of Work
In this article from the June issue of Communications of the ACM, Neil Savage delivers a comprehensive overview of the careers and accomplishments of 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton. From their separate beginnings in the computer sciences, to their meeting and collaboration on a research project at the University of Massachusetts, and their ultimate development of the modern field of reinforcement learning (RL)—a key method in artificial intelligence (AI) that trains neural networks by offering them rewards, much like the chemical boost that neurons get from doing something positive. It is that work which earned Barto and Sutton the "Nobel Prize in Computing."
Program Merge: What's Deep Learning Got to Do with It?
If you regularly work with open-source code or produce software for a large organization, you're already familiar with many of the challenges posed by collaborative programming at scale. And the scale of the problem has gotten much worse. This is what led a group of researchers at MSR (Microsoft Research) to take on the task of complicated merges as a grand program-repair challenge—one they believed might be addressed at least in part by machine learning. To understand the thinking that led to this effort and then follow where that led, Erik Meijer and Terry Coatta spoke with three of the leading figures in the MSR research effort, called DeepMerge
Developing the Foundations of Reinforcement Learning
The examples are nothing if not relatable: preparing breakfast, or playing a game of chess or tic-tac-toe. Yet the idea of learning from the environment and taking steps that progress toward a goal apparently was under-studied when 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton took on the topic in the late 1970s. Eventually, their research led to the creation of reinforcement learning algorithms that sought not to recognize patterns but maximize rewards. In this Q&A from the June issue of Communications of the ACM, Barto and Sutton speak about how it all unfolded, and what’s next for the techniques that are so celebrated for their success in AlphaGo and AlphaZero.
Systems Correctness Practices at Amazon Web Services
ACM Queue’s "Research for Practice" serves up expert-curated guides to the best of computing research, and relates these breakthroughs to the challenges that software engineers face every day. In this installment, Marc Brooker and Ankush Desai look at how Amazon Web Services (AWS) strives to deliver reliable services that customers can trust completely. This requires maintaining the highest standards of security, durability, integrity, and availability—with systems correctness serving as the cornerstone for achieving these priorities. They highlight the approach for ensuring the correctness of critical services that have since become among the most widely used by AWS customers.
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ACM Code of Ethics
The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct was updated in 2018 to address the significant advances in computing technology since the 1992 version, as well as the growing pervasiveness of computing in all aspects of society.
Lifelong Learning
ACM offers lifelong learning resources including online books and courses from Skillsoft, TechTalks on the hottest topics in computing and IT, and more.
Send Email as Your "@acm.org" Address
ACM is excited to announce a new enhancement of to the widely used ACM email forwarding service. Through a partnership with MailRoute, SMTP Auth Relay is now available for member use. To start sending fully authenticated email as your @acm.org address, simply log in at https://myacm.acm.org and click the "SMTP Auth Relay" link.