Highlights from ACM’s Celebration of 50 Years of the A.M. Turing Award

August 8, 2017

ACM celebrated 50 years of the A.M. Turing Award with a two-day conference June 23 - 24 at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. This milestone event was designed to highlight the significant impact of the contributions of the Turing Laureates on computing and society, to look ahead to the future of technology and innovation, and to help inspire the next generation of computer scientists to invent and dream.

Twenty-three Turing Laureates attended the conference, and nine Laureates took part by participating in panel discussions or delivering talks. Fifteen ACM Special Interest Groups sponsored the conference, and funded 110 student scholars to attend the event, enabling them to interact with Turing Laureates throughout the course of the conference.

ACM SIG Sponsors of the event included SIGARCH, SIGCHI, SIGCOMM, SIGGRAPH, SIGHPC, SIGIR, SIGKDD, SIGMM, SIGMOD, SIGPLAN and SIGSOFT, and SIG Supporters included SIGACCESS, SIGAI, SIGEVO and SIGITE. Corporate sponsors included Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and IBM. Facebook was Broadcast Partner.

Panel discussions covered a wide range of topics of current interest to both those in the profession and to society at large, including deep neural networks, privacy, preservation of electronic artifacts, computing in a post-Moore’s Law world, ethics in computing, quantum computing and augmented reality.

The conference was livestreamed on ACM’s website and on Facebook. Watch on-demand videos of the talks and panels.

Watch a series of short videos shown at the conference of Turing Laureates reflecting on their work and accomplishments.

View photos from the conference, and view photos from a reception held after the first day of the conference.