ACM MemberNet - August 30, 2012

Welcome to the July/August edition of ACM MemberNet, bringing you the world of ACM and beyond. Explore the many facets of ACM with our newsletter of member activities and events. Read current and past issues of MemberNet online at http://membernet.acm.org. Is there a person, event, or issue you'd like to see covered? Please email mn-editor at acm.org.

TOP STORIES

Awards Member Recognition SIG Awards Conferences and Events Member Programs Learning Center Career & Job Center Education Student News Distinguished Speakers Program Chapters News ACM-W News Publications News ACM in the News
TOP STORIES

Judea Pearl's Turing Award Lecture Now Available on Video
2011 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl presented the ACM Turing Lecture at the AAAI 2012 conference on artificial intelligence in Toronto on July 24. Pearl, who received the Turing Award this year for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning, spoke on "The Mechanization of Causal Inference: A 'Mini Turing Test' and Beyond". The Turing Lecture is now available as an on-demand video on the ACM Turing Lecture site.

Awards

Three ACM Award Recipients Named Simons Investigators
Three ACM award recipients were among the computer scientists named by the Simons Foundation as Simons Investigators. Sanjeev Arora, who recieved the 2011 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences, was cited as playing a pivotal role in some of the deepest and most influential results in theoretical computer science. Shafrira Goldwasser, recipient of the ACM Grace Hopper Award (1996), ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award (2008), and SIGACT Gödel Prize in Theoretical Computer Science (1993, 2001), was cited for her tremendous impact on the development of cryptography and complexity theory. And Jon Kleinberg, who recieved the 2008 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award, was cited for his creativity, intellectual ability, research scholarship, diversity of research interests and the impact of his work. This recoginition is especially significant, since this is the inaugural year of the program, which provides a stable base of support for outstanding scientists, enabling them to undertake long-term study of fundamental questions.

Call for ACM Award Nominations
Each year, ACM recognizes technical and professional achievements within the computing and information technology community through its celebrated Awards Program. And annually, ACM's award committees evaluate the contributions of candidates for various awards that span a spectrum of professional and technological accomplishments. You and your colleagues are invited to nominate candidates for ACM awards, including:
Awards with November 30 nomination deadlines:
  • A.M. Turing Award
  • ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences
  • ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award
  • Software System Award
  • Grace Murray Hopper Award
  • Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award
  • Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics
  • Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award
  • Distinguished Service Award
  • Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award
Other Award deadlines:
  • Doctoral Dissertation Award: October 31
Please take a moment to consider those individuals in your community who may be suitable for nomination. Refer to http://www.acm.org/nominations for nomination guidelines and the complete listing of Award Subcommittee Chairs and Members.

Member Recognition

Call for ACM Senior Member and Fellows Nominations
The Senior Member advanced grade of membership recognizes ACM members with at least 10 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous ACM Professional membership who have demonstrated performance and accomplishment that set them apart from their peers. Nominations are accepted on a quarterly basis. The deadline for nominations is September 4.

Fellow is ACM's most prestigious member grade recognizing the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. The deadline for nominations is September 5. Please read past ACM Awards Committee Co-chair James Horning's Making the case for an ACM Fellow.
 
SIG Awards

ACM SIG Awards Recognize Achievements in Diverse Fields
ACM's Special Interest Groups (SIGs) regularly cite outstanding individuals for their contributions in more than 30 distinct technological fields. Some awards presented (or to be presented) at recent conferences:
Conferences and Events

ICAC 2012, September 17 to 21, San Jose, California
The 9th ACM International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2012) is the leading conference on autonomic computing techniques, foundations, and applications. It brings together researchers and practitioners across disciplines including computer systems, networking, software engineering, data management, machine learning, control theory, and bio-inspired computing to address multiple facets of adaptation and self-management in computing systems and applications from different perspectives. Sessions will cover Virtualization, Performance and Resource Management, Mobile Computing, Automated Machine Learning, Control-Based Approaches, Energy, Cloud Technologies, Diagnosis and Monitoring, and more. Scheduled keynote speakers are Amin Vahdat (Google and University of California, San Diego), Subutai Ahmad (VP Engineering, Numenta), and Eitan Frachtenberg (Facebook).

GHC 2012, October 3 to 6, Baltimore, Maryland
The 12th Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women of Computing (GHC 2012), presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, is the world's largest gathering of women in computing. This year's theme, "Are We There Yet?", recognizes that technology and the culture of technology are continuously evolving. Sessions will focus on key technology areas: Big Data, Security, and Social Collaboration. A Tech Entrepreneurs' Lab will open with a presentation by Robin Chase, founder and ex-CEO of Zipcar and currently founder and CEO of Buzzcar. In a first-ever government plenary, a panel of technology leaders in government will discuss the role of technology in solving big societal problems. In addition, a new track of sessions related to Women of Under-Represented Groups will broaden the accessibility of the conference. Scheduled keynote speakers are Nora Denzel of Intuit, and Anita K. Jones of the University of Virginia. Confirmed technical speakers hail from a variety of corporate and academic institutions, including Microsoft Research, WellPoint, University of Massachusetts, UCLA, and PepsiCo.

ACM-BCB 2012, October 7 to 12, Orlando Florida
The ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Biomedicine (BCB 2012) is the main flagship conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Bioinformatics. ACM BCB 2012 is in its third year, building upon the success of ACM BCB 2010 in Niagara Falls and ACM BCB 2011 in Chicago. The conference is a premier forum for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research encompassing disciplines of computer science, mathematics, statistics, biology, bioinformatics, and biomedicine. Papers will cover Genomics and Evolution; Protein and RNA Structure, Protein Function, and Proteomics; Computational Systems Biology; Next Generation Sequencing Data; Medical Informatics and Translational Bioinformatics; Cross-Cutting Computational Methods; Bioinformatics Infrastructure; Computational Epidemiology; Image Analysis; Knowledge Representation and Inference; Integration of Biomedical Data; Databases, Knowledgebases; Ontologies; Text Mining and Natural Language Processing; and more. Four workshops on Immunoinformatics and Computational Immunology; Biological Network Analysis and Applications in Translational and Personalized Medicine; Parallel and Cloud-based Bioinformatics and Biomedicine; and Robustness and Stability of Biological Systems and Computational Solutions. "An Introduction to Evolutionary Computation for Bioinformatics" and "A Survey of Computational Approaches to Reconstruct, Partition, and Query Biological Networks" are the two scheduled tutorials. The program also includes invited talks by Ying Xu (University of Georgia), on "Genomic Location Is Information: Towards Understanding the Organizational Principles of Bacterial Genomes"; Martha L. Bulyk (Harvard University), on "Transcription Factors and DNA Regulatory Elements" and Pierre Baldi (University of California, Irvine), on "Machine Learning Approaches in Proteomics."

SIGITE & RIIT 2012, October 11 to 13, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
The dual conference format of the 13th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education and the 1st Annual Research in IT Conference (SIGITE/RIIT 2012) provides a forum for sharing and developing ideas relating to Information Technology research, education, applications, IT-industry-academia relationships and our roles as professionals, educators, and advocates for the effective use of Information Technology. This year's event includes a new IT Research conference; our aim is to provide a venue for showcasing research in information technology that may or may not have a connection with teaching IT. These two conferences, carrying the joint theme of Working Together: Research & Education for IT, will be co-located and tightly integrated; attendees will be able to attend sessions of both at no additional charge. Both conferences are sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Technology Education (SIGITE).

SIGUCCS 2012, October 14 to 19, Memphis, Tennessee
The SIGUCCS 2012 conference, sponsored by ACM's Special Interest Group on University and College Computing Services, focuses on the issues surrounding the support, delivery, and management of college and university IT services. The format provides members and others in the field of college and university IT support a wide variety of learning and professional development opportunities. The conference is made up of two distinct components: the Management Symposium and the User Support Conference. Both segments give IT professionals extended time to acquire knowledge and to network with other IT professionals at all levels. Scheduled speakers will address Collaborating for Change, The Future of Social Media in Education, and Getting Into the Mind of the Customer, and how IT professionals can use this idea to develop and deliver more useful applications and services to their end-user communities.

SPLASH 2012, October 19 to 26, Tucson, Arizona
SPLASH, the conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (formerly known as OOPSLA) embraces all aspects of software construction and delivery. This is the premier conference at the intersection of programming languages, programming, and software engineering, providing a forum for software innovation while broadening the scope of the conference into new topics beyond objects and new forms of contributions. Co-located events are Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP) and the Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS). Scheduled keynote speakers are Barbara Simons, former ACM president and e-voting expert; Jim Coplien, an authority, author, and trainer in software design and organizational improvements; K. Rustan M. Leino, a Principal Researcher in the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group at Microsoft Research; and Rob Pike, a Distinguished Engineer at Google.

SC12, November 10 to 16, Salt Lake City, Utah
SC12, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, gathers the best and brightest minds in supercomputing, with technical papers, tutorials, posters and speakers. World-renowned theoretical physicist and bestselling author Michio Kaku will deliver the keynote. The technical program will explore all aspects of high performance computing, from parallelism to exascale.

HILT 2012, December 2 to 6, Boston
HILT, the conference on High Integrity Language Technology sponsored by SIGAda, will provide a forum for experts from academia/research, industry, and government to present the latest findings in designing, implementing, and using language technology for high integrity software. Technical papers, experience reports (including experience in teaching), and tutorial proposals will cover a broad range of relevant topics. Scheduled keynote speakers include Barbara Liskov, the winner of the 2008 ACM A.M. Turing Award and the first woman in the US to receive a Ph.D. in computer science. Other keynote presentations from leading experts in language technology and high-integrity systems: Kathleen Fisher, an ACM Fellow and DARPA Project Manager for High-Assurance Cyber Systems; Nancy Leveson, professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and professor of engineering systems at MIT, and an ACM Allen Newell Award recipient; Greg Morrisett, the Allen B. Cutting professor of computer science at Harvard, also on the editorial board of Journal of the ACM; and Guy Steele, a software architect at Oracle and an ACM Fellow and Grace Murray Hopper Award recipient.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2012, November 28 to December 1, Singapore
The SIGGRAPH Asia conference features a myriad of stellar and innovative contributions from artists, designers, animators, researchers, and developers from industry and academia. As with the US SIGGRAPH conference, the events are geared to the computer graphics community and those in related fields, and include exhibits, an Art Gallery, the Computer Animation Festival, courses, posters, an Emerging Technologies track, an apps symposium, and technical papers and briefs. Featured speakers will include Karlheinz Brandenburg, the "father of MP3," and Richard Chuang, co-founder of PDI/DreamWorks.
 
Member Programs

Become an Ambassador for ACM—You Could Be a Grand Prize Winner!
ACM congratulates the top recruiters for this year's member referral campaign, Ambassadors for ACM. Amarendra Kothalanka of Dadi Institute of Engineering & Technology in Anakapalle, Andhra Pradesh, India qualified for the first Grand Prize, an Android tablet. The Second Grand Prize, a Barnes & Noble Nook e-book reader, went to Arvind R. Hulgeri of Persistent Systems Limited in Erandwane, Pune, India.

The Ambassadors for ACM program rewards ACM members like you for encouraging new members to join. Your first-hand experience with ACM's valuable career development and continuous learning programs makes you a perfect envoy to share your ACM experiences with prospective members. Please consider becoming an Ambassador for ACM. The 2012-2013 Ambassadors for ACM program is underway, with opportunities for you to earn new prizes, rewards and bonus gifts with each referral.

Submit the ACM Referral Form, and your referrals can join ACM at a special discount rate. Our members are our greatest asset. Your support of ACM is critical to our continuing efforts to advance computing as a science and a profession.

ACM Group Level Term Life Insurance Plan
The ACM Group Term Life Insurance Plan administered by Marsh U.S. Consumer, a service of Seabury & Smith, Inc., is an important member benefit available to ACM members and their families at affordable, group-negotiated rates. ACM members and their spouses/domestic partners are eligible to apply for up to $500,000 in benefit amounts. (Children's coverage is available up to $5,000.) This plan also offers an Accelerated Life Benefit, which pays up to 60% of the benefit amount before death if the insured is diagnosed as terminally ill. Other plan features include a 30-day review period and the option for members to choose their own beneficiary. Learn more about ACM Group Level Term Life Insurance Plan today, or call 1-800-503-9230.

Live Chat Feature Now Available to Members
ACM's new interactive Live Chat feature provides members with an opportunity for real-time customer service from our Member Service Representatives. To start your chat, simply log in to myACM with your ACM web account username and password and click on the Live Chat icon. Live chat is available Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET. Any chats attempted after hours will automatically generate an email to ACM to be answered during regular business hours.
 
Learning Center

ACM Relaunches Online Course Program with More Targeted IT and Business Content from Skillsoft
The ACM Learning Center's online course collection has been revamped, and is now hosted by Skillsoft and served through the Skillport Learning Management System. The new course catalog offers members access to 500 courses on a wide range of computing and business topics including programming, Web design and development, cloud computing, databases, networks and operating systems, as well as business intelligence, IT infrastructure management, and project management. Skillsoft is an industry-leading provider of online training and professional development. Your Skillsoft login now provides access to both books and courses, since Skillsoft serves both courses and our Books 24x7 program through the Skillport learning portal. You can search across book and course content by topic within Skillport and get to your professional development assets faster. Learn more by visiting the ACM Learning Center courses home page and reading the FAQ.

Free ACM Learning Webinar September 20: "Recommender Systems: The Power of Personalization"
ACM's next free Learning Webinar, "Recommender Systems: The Power of Personalization," will provide an introduction to recommender systems, describing the different types of recommendation technologies available and how they are used in different applications today. The webinar will be presented by Joseph A. Konstan, a computer science professor at the University of Minnesota who has also been active in ACM and SIGCHI, and moderated by Gary M. Olson, professor of information and computer sciences at the University of California, Irvine. The webinar will take place Thursday, September 20 at 12 PM EDT (9 AM PDT/10 AM MDT/11 AM CDT/4 PM UTC). Register now. (Note: You can stream this and all ACM Learning Webinars on your mobile device, including smartphones and tablets.)

New Titles Added to Books24x7 Library
ACM recently conducted an "off-cycle" book swap to replenish our Books24x7 eBooks collection. Quality titles from Apress, McGraw-Hill, SYBEX, Wiley, Wrox Press, and others update and extend coverage of Microsoft technologies such as ASP.NET, Embedded Compact 7, Exchange Server, Power Shell, SharePoint, Silverlight 4 and 5, SQL Server, T-SQL, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010, and Windows 8. New and updated exam study guides cover Cisco's CCNA, CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker), CompTIA Security+, ITIL, and MCTS. Other notable topics include iOS 5 Development, Java, JavaScript, Servlet & JSP, Software Estimation and Testing, and VMware vSphere 5. In all, 57 carefully selected new books were added to our eBooks library. Take a look at all the new books here.

Register by September 7 for Stevens' WebCampus Fall Session!
Registration for Stevens Institute of Technology's WebCampus Fall Session ends September 7! Orientation is now in progress. Students who are members of ACM receive a 10% rebate when they enroll in WebCampus courses. Students do not have to be accepted into a program in order to take graduate classes at Stevens. It is possible to take up to three classes as a non-matriculating student while your application is under review. For more information contact the WebCampus Division at [email protected], or call (201) 216-5092.

Free NYU-Poly Lecture September 7, "Defending Cyberspace: Are We Ready?"
NYU-Poly is hosting an in-person and internet simulcast event, Defending Cyberspace: Are We Ready? on September 7. In its second Sloan Cyber Security Lecture, the National Security Agency's Information Assurance Director Debora A. Plunkett discusses current cyber security threats, vulnerabilities and trends. She outlines critical steps that must be taken to ensure our nation is ready to meet future cyber security challenges. While exploring key technology trends affecting our security posture, Plunkett highlights the importance of building a robust cyber workforce. Continuing the theme covered by the first lecture in the series, she underscores the essential importance of strong industry, government, and academic partnerships, and highlights the tactical benefits of information sharing. The lecture concludes with a call to introduce standard processes and practices, across industry and government, to combat the growing cyber threat. This event is free to the public and will be streamed live on NYU-Poly's site.

Career & Job Center

Import Your LinkedIn Profile in ACM's Career & Job Center
Be sure to visit ACM's Career & Job Center to update your résumé or create a new one in the Résumé Bank. ACM members' résumés include an ACM logo on their entry, highlighting their ACM membership to employers.

Now available when posting a résumé in the Résumé Bank: import your LinkedIn profile. You will be required to sign in to your LinkedIn account. Please note that LinkedIn does not have exactly the same fields as ACM, so you will have to review the imported information and update where necessary. Once you have a résumé created and saved in our system, you can publish it to the Résumé Bank so that employers find you! Or keep it private and use it when applying online for jobs. Log in to ACM's Job Board and post your résumé today. You can also upgrade to a Preferred Résumé to keep it at the top of the Résumé Bank, highlighted with a star next to it for increased visibility ($25 for 90 days).

In addition, ACM offers CareerNews, which provides summaries of articles on career-related topics of interest to students and professionals in the computing field, in a bi-weekly email alert to ACM members. ACM members can subscribe to the CareerNews email alert service.

For more information about the Career & Job Center please contact Jennifer Ruzicka.
 
Education

New Site for Computing Educators
Ensemble is a new collaborative portal for computing educators where you can share and upload files, resources, and other valuable information, join groups and communities, and participate in discussion on important education news and research. An NSF NSDL (National STEM Education Distributed Learning) Pathways project, Ensemble provides single access to a broad range of existing educational resources for computing while preserving the collections and their associated curation processes. The site strongly encourages use, reuse, review and evaluation of educational materials at multiple levels of granularity and seeks to support the full range of computing education communities, including computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, information science, information systems and information technology as well as other areas often called "computing + X" or "X informatics." Users can tag, rate, and comment on one another's contributions and participation. Notably, Ensemble offers a set of "ready-for-prime-time" technology resources as part of TECH, a project of the ACM Education Council.
 
Student News

Hacking Card Game Featured at BlackHat 2012
Partially funded by SIGCSE, the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education, Control-Alt-Hack is a new table-top card game whose theme is Internet security. Recently presented at the Black Hat 2012 conference in Las Vegas, the game employs cybersecurity concepts and, according to its creator Yoshi Kohno (associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington), could support computer science curricula at the high school and college levels.
Read more about Control-Alt-Hack in this article.

Upcoming ACM Student Research Competitions
ACM Student Research Competitions (SRCs), sponsored by Microsoft Research, offer a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research at well-known ACM sponsored and co-sponsored conferences before a panel of judges and attendees. The most recent SRC winners presented at MOBICOM and SIGGRAPH. The next conferences accepting submissions are:
  • SIGCSE 2013, March 6-9, 2013, deadline September 30, 2012
  • AOSD 2013, March 24-29, 2013, deadline October 21, 2012
  • SAC 2013, March 18-22, 2013, deadline October 31, 2012
  • ICSE 2013, May 18-26, 2013, deadline December 17, 2012
  • CHI 2013, April 27-May 2, deadline January 5, 2013
Learn about more competitions on the SRC submissions page.

CRA's URO Zone Connects Students with Opportunities for Undergraduate Research
The Computing Research Association (CRA) recently launched a website to help undergraduate students identify computing research opportunities. The site—URO Zone, for Undergraduate Research Opportunities—provides links to a range of summer undergraduate research resources. It also posts profiles of undergraduates and details their recent computing research projects. URO Zone offers guidelines to help discover research opportunities in a variety of areas, from applied to theoretical computer science. It also defines specific research fields, describes CRA and ACM undergraduate awards programs, and lists links for finding computing research opportunities.

ACM-W Student Scholarships for Attendance at Research Conferences
The ACM Women's Council (ACM-W), with funding from Wipro Technologies, provides support for women undergraduate or graduate students in computer science and related programs who wish to attend research conferences. The student does not have to present a paper at the conference she attends. High school students will also be considered for conference support. As of 2011, 20 ACM-W/Wipro scholarships are funded annually: 10 scholarships of up to $600 will be awarded for intra-continental conference travel, and 10 scholarships of up to $1,200 will be awarded for intercontinental conference travel. ACM-W encourages the student's home department to match the scholarship award and recognize the student's achievement locally within her department. In addition, if the award is for attendance at one of several ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) conferences (SIGACCESS, SIGACT, SIGARCH, SIGCOMM, SIGCHI, SIGCSE, SIGDA, SIGECOM, SIGEVO, SIGGRAPH, SIGIR, SIGITE, SIGMM, SIGMOBILE, SIGOPS, SIGPLAN, and SIGSOFT), the SIG will provide complementary conference registration and a mentor during the conference. Applications are evaluated in six groups each year, in order to distribute awards across a range of conferences. For application form, notification dates and more information, please visit the scholarships page.

Additional scholarship awards for women students to attend research conferences have recently been made possible by Microsoft Research. Microsoft has given ACM-W $20,000 to support scholarships for women of European citizenship. Under the agreement with Microsoft, these awards will cover conference registration fees and provide an additional $600 if the conference is intracontinental, or $1200 if it is involves intercontinental travel. The student does not have to be attending a European school in order to be eligible, and the amount of the award is based on where she attends school relative to where the conference is. We are delighted to have this additional support for the scholarships, in addition to the funds we already have from Wipro Ltd. In addition, 16 SIGs have thus far signed on to support the scholarships by providing complimentary conference registration to scholarship recipients.
 
Distinguished Speakers Program

Featured ACM Distinguished Speaker: Yale Patt
The Distinguished Speakers Program (DSP) is one of ACM's most valued outreach programs, providing universities, corporations, event and conference planners, and local ACM chapters with direct access to top technology leaders and innovators from nearly every sector of the computing industry.

This month's featured speaker is Yale Patt. Yale has consulted extensively in the computer industry for the past 40 years, helping major manufacturers design high peformance microprocessors and systems. He is vitally concerned with the way we introduce computing to undergraduate computer science and engineering majors. His research results have been adopted extensively in current high performance microprocessors. Yale earned a BS (Northeastern), MS and PhD (Stanford) degrees in electrical engineering. He is a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM. He was named Outstanding ACM Lecturer in 1998-1999, and in 2000-2001, and received the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award in 2000, the ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award (the highest honor in the field of Computer Architecture) in 1996, and many other distinctions for excellence in teaching. He co-wrote the textbook, Introduction to Computing Systems: from Bits and Gates to C and Beyond with his former PhD student, Sanjay Patel of the University of Illinois.
For more information on Yale, please visit his DSP speaker information page.
Yale Patt's Digital Library author page.

ACM, IEEE Computer Society Join to Share Distinguished Speakers Programs
IEEE-CS and ACM have joined to share their invited speaker programs, to further the dissemination of technical knowledge of computing fields that greatly benefit both memberships. IEEE-CS chapter volunteers can host a speaker from ACM's Distinguished Speakers Program (DSP), with access to top technology leaders and innovators from nearly every sector of the computing industry, by following the instructions on the DSP site. Make sure you identify yourself as an IEEE Computer Society Chapter.

IEEE-CS provides a popular offering of first-quality speakers serving its professional and student chapters. The Distinguished Visitors Program (DVP) owes its success to the many volunteers and staff members of the Computer Society who generously contribute their time and talent. Organizers of an ACM chapter, conference, or event can host a speaker from IEEE-CS's DVP by following the instructions instructions on the DVP site. Make sure you identify yourself as an ACM chapter or event.
 
Chapters News

Notice to Chapters: Please Complete Your Annual Reports
Chapter Leaders: If you have not yet submitted your annual report for the fiscal year July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2012, please do so as soon as possible. To access your chapter's administrative interface, enter your username and password here: https://campus.acm.org/chapter_admin. If you have forgotten your username or password, please follow this link: https://campus.acm.org/public/account/signin.cfm?r=1. In addition, you may notice the Annual Report looks a bit different from years past. ACM has been working hard to serve our chapters in the best way possible, and this new release provides a user-friendly interface which allows full editing of your information until submission. SIGGRAPH Chapters will find additional questions at the end of their report that must be completed as well. Any questions, please contact [email protected].

Welcome New ACM Chapters
Chapters are the "local neighborhoods" of ACM. The regional ACM Professional, Student, ACM-W, and Special Interest Group (SIG) chapters around the globe involve members locally in competitions, seminars, lectures, workshops, and networking opportunities. ACM welcomes these new chapters that were chartered June 23, 2012 to August 24, 2012:

ACM Student Chapters:
  • Bears University of Central Arkansas ACM Student Chapter, Conway, Arkansas
  • ESCOM-IPN ACM Student Chapter, Col Lindavista, Mexico
  • Governors State University ACM Student Chapter, University Park, Illinois
  • IT-KKWIEER ACM Student Chapter, Nashik, India
  • PCCOE ACM Student Chapter, Pune, India
  • Perm ACM Student Chapter, Perm, Russia
  • SSN ACM Student Chapter, Chennai, India
  • University of Georgia ACM Student Chapter, Athens
  • USP ACM Student Chapter, Suva, Fiji
ACM Professional Chapter:
  • Nanjing ACM Chapter, Nanjing, China
ACM-W News

Midwest Regional Celebration of Women in Computing Encourages with Creative Games, Career Coaching
by MinneWIC 2012 Conference Coordinator Jennifer Rosato (College of St. Scholastica)
The Second Regional Celebration of Women in Computing in the Upper Midwest (MinneWIC 2012) was held February 24 and 25 at the University of Minnesota. 173 attendees (90 of them students) from the region attended, including a pair of students from Michigan. Friday evening began with a poster session. The best undergraduate prize went to Cecylia Bocovich of Macalester College for her poster on "Parallelizing a Lattice Reduction Algorithm on a GPU," and the best graduate poster went to Jaya Kawale of University of Minnesota for her poster on "A Graph Based Approach to Find Teleconnections in Climate Data." Marie Manner, from the University of Minnesota, received the service award for all her help in organizing the event. All three received scholarships to attend this year's 2012 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) in October. During dinner, Caitlin Keller of Washington University in St. Louis presented Looking Glass, an environment built on Alice that aims to engage non-programmers more fully in creating digital stories. Looking Glass includes pre-mixed worlds with challenges such as "Magical Mystery: The bunny jumps into the magical vortex, what happens next?" After dinner, attendees put their own creative skills to work in an e-textile session and created stuffed animals with lights and other components. Saturday morning started off with an engaging presentation by Jacquelyn Crowhurst, Director of Developer Tools for Microsoft, speaking about the various types of positions she has held over her career. The conference concluded with a job and internship fair, with companies such as Target, Thomson Reuters, Symantec and Adventium Labs present. Many companies also provided help with resumes and gave mock interviews.

The Grace Hopper Regional Consortium, a project of ACM-W, provides programming that showcases female role models, encourages mentoring and networking, supplies accurate information about computing careers and creates opportunities for women to participate in the program, often for the first time in their careers. Visit the Grace Hopper Regional Consortium site to learn more about these events.

Join ACM-W's Membership Email List
Did you know that ACM-W offers a general email distribution list for its members? This ACMW-public list is a communication channel for disseminating general information about ACM-W, bulletins and upcoming events. To join the list: http://signup.acm.org/listserv_index.cfm?ln=ACM-W-PUBLIC. And to keep more informed about the activities of ACM-W and its members, you can sign up for our quarterly CIS Newsletter notification. Be sure to read the current issue for the latest news on ACM-W activities and events on the ACM-W CIS Newsletter issues page.
 
Publications News

CACM Goes Mobile
ACM's flagship publication Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine that delivers leading-edge content to the worldwide computing community, is now accessible as an easy-to-use mobile application for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. These new downloadable apps enable ACM's more than 100,000 members to access CACM's information, insights, and ideas from distinguished columnists and industry luminaries in computing and information technology in a new way. They also offer personalized tools for sharing, searching, and storing important news stories anytime, anywhere. For more information, read the press release.

Information Systems Category Editor Needed for Computing Reviews
Computing Reviews, the post-publication review and comment journal of ACM, is seeking a volunteer interested in serving as a category editor in the information systems area. Please see the Information Systems Category Editor search page for more information.

CACM Reports: Carrying and Spending Money Without a Trace
What if we could carry and spend money that would not leave a paper trail or weigh down our pockets? In the August cover story of Communications of the ACM (CACM), a group of computer scientists joined by a financial management expert survey recent efforts to make this idealized form of money using quantum mechanics. The group, which includes professors from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Waterloo, and Bar Ilan University as well as a co-founder of AMA Capital Management, point to a "no-cloning" theorem that in principle enables the design of quantum systems that cannot be copied. Identifying a type of digital currency called public-key quantum money, they explain the resurgence of interest in this development and the challenges in designing it for money as well as for software programs that anyone can use but no one can copy. Also in this issue, Bill Poucher, the executive director of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), describes how the competition gives students a competitive edge.

Communications, the flagship publication of ACM, offers readers access to this generation's most significant leaders and innovators in computing and information technology, and is available in print, Web and digital format.
Read the ACM press release.

ACM Queue Presents: All Your Database Are Belong to Us
As the move to the cloud puts pressure on the closed-world assumption of the database, exposing naked data and relying on declarative magic becomes a liability rather than an asset. In the cloud, the roles are reversed, and objects should hide their private data representation, exposing it only via well-defined behavioral interfaces. In the big open world of the cloud, highly available distributed objects will rule. Erik Meijer of Microsoft details this trend for ACM Queue.

Subscribe to Communications of the ACM
Subscribe to Communications of the ACM, the computing industry's most trusted source for news, analysis and insights! Non-members can use our online form and receive a new ACM membership with your 12-month subscription, or request a sample issue using our online free trial issue form.

ACM in the News

"Twelve-Year-Old Programmers Help Fuel IPhone Game Frenzy"
Bloomberg Businessweek, August 29, 2012
"In the last few years, we've seen this explosion of engaging students and in teaching them the basic concepts," said Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). "Alice, Scratch—they're becoming incredibly popular because students love them and can do real, creative things with them."

"How to Feed Data-Hungry Mobile Devices? Use More Antennas"
Science Daily, August 23, 2012
Researchers from Rice University have just unveiled a new multi-antenna technology that could help wireless providers keep pace with the voracious demands of data-hungry smartphones and tablets. Details about the new technology, dubbed Argos, were presented at ACM's MobiCom 2012 wireless research conference in Istanbul.

"Fighting Back Against Click-Spam"
PhysOrg.com, August 16, 2012
University of Texas at Austin researchers recently presented their paper, "Measuring and Fingerprinting Click-Spam in Ad Networks," at the SIGCOMM 2012 conference. The paper aimed to quantify the traffic on an ad network.

"Internet Voting Advocates Ignorant of Software, Says Simons"
FierceGovernmentIT, August 15, 2012
Advocates of using the Internet for elections often form their opinions about voting without having any real knowledge of how software works, according to VerifiedVoting.org board member and former ACM president Barbara Simons.

"What Makes Paris Look Like Paris? CMU Software Uncovers Stylistic Core"
Carnegie Mellon News, August 7, 2012
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed visual data-mining software that can automatically detect the subtle features that make cities unique, such as street signs, street lamps, and balcony railings. They presented their research at SIGGRAPH 2012.

"Lack of Minority Representation in Science and Engineering Endangering U.S. Economic Health"
HPC Wire, July 26, 2012
Many of the "precious few" minority students pursuing science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) degrees are either dropping out or changing majors, says Rice University professor Richard Tapia, who founded the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing.

"Can We Fix Computer Science Education in America?"
TIME, July 16, 2012
"What often happens is that we spend a lot of effort trying to get technology into schools, but that isn't coupled with ensuring that there is a really strong computer science curriculum behind it with really good teachers," says Cameron Wilson, ACM's director of ACM's Public Policy Office.

"Professor Dame Wendy Hall named among most influential women in IT"
The Business Magazine, UK, July 17, 2012
Hall, dean of physical and applied sciences at the University of Southampton and a former ACM president, has been named as the second most influential woman in UK IT by a national computing website.

"Interview with Alan Kay"
Dr. Dobb's Journal, July 10, 2012
ACM Turing Award recipient (2003) Alan Kay says many programmers who code for money have a lack of awareness of the roots of their culture, to the point that they consider the Internet something akin to a natural resource rather than a man-made construct.
 

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