Call for Nominations for 2021 ACM Awards

August 17, 2021

Dear Members of ACM,

ACM seeks your help in diversifying the nomination pool for our 2021 Awards. The ACM Awards process works by having individual award committees evaluate the candidate nominations submitted for that award. It is often the case that people wonder why a specific person who seems highly deserving has not received an ACM award. The common answer for this is that the person was never nominated. We ask you to help distribute the 2021 ACM Awards Call for Nominations to your network through distribution lists, related organizations, and individual contacts to help ensure that deserving candidates are nominated.

ACM seeks to get the word out about the need to nominate highly qualified candidates, and we ask people to consider ACM’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. As noted by ACM’s Diversity and Inclusion Council, this commitment includes multiple aspects of diversity such as age, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, nationality, physical ability, thinking style and experience. We encourage all potential nominators to think of these factors when considering deserving individuals to nominate. Candidates need not be ACM members to be nominated.

The Call for Nominations document outlines the awards not only for lifelong contributions, but also for early-to-mid career contributions and specific types of contributions such as education contributions or outstanding contributions to ACM, along with specific attention to certain technical areas such as artificial intelligence, high performance computing, and programming systems. There is also the Athena Lecturer Award that each year honors a preeminent woman in computing.

This year there is a new award that highlights the value of mentoring in the development of computing professionals. This new award is the ACM Frances E. Allen Award for Outstanding Mentoring, which emphasizes contributions in mentoring students and young professionals from diverse communities.

Again, ACM seeks your assistance in broadly distributing this call for nominations. Details about the nomination process for individual awards can be found at https://awards.acm.org. Remember, deserving individuals cannot receive these awards unless someone such as you takes the time to submit their nomination for an Award!

Sincerely,

Vicki L. Hanson, PhD
ACM CEO