ACM MemberNet - May 26, 2016

Welcome to the May 2016 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.

More ACM member newsletters: ACM-W Connections, newsletter from ACM Women's Council; MemberNet Europe; MemberNet India.

Read coverage of ACM in the news media.

Is there a person, event, or issue you'd like to see covered? Please email mn-editor at acm.org.

May 26, 2016

TOP STORIES

ACM Elects Vicki Hanson as President

ACM has elected Vicki Hanson as President for a two-year term beginning July 1. Hanson, who is Distinguished Professor of Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, and Professor and Chair of Inclusive Technologies at University of Dundee, UK, said her vision as President is to reach out to practitioners, young professionals and the global computing community, as well as underserved communities.

Also elected to two-year terms were Vice President Cherri Pancake, Professor Emeritus and Intel Faculty Fellow in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University; and Secretary/Treasurer Elizabeth Churchill, Director of User Experience at Google in Mountain View, California.

President, Vice President and Secretary/Treasurer serve two-year terms from July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2018.

In addition, Members-at-Large elected to four-year terms are Gabriele Anderst-Kotsis, Professor and Head of the Department of Telecooperation at Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria; Susan Dumais, Distinguished Scientist and Deputy Managing Director at Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington; Elizabeth Mynatt, Professor of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta; Pam Samuelson, Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at University of California, Berkeley's School of Law; and Eugene H. Spafford, Professor and Executive Director at Purdue University's Center for Education and Research in Information Security and Assurance (CERIAS), West Lafayette, Indiana. They will serve four-year terms from July 1, 2016 - June 30, 2020.

The new officers elected by ACM professional members represent the nearly 100,000 computing professionals and students who comprise ACM's international membership.

ACM Announces Honors for Leadership in Parallel Computing and Educationg

Ron Perrott, an international leader in the development and promotion of parallel computing, and Armando Fox, a trailblazer in technology-enhanced education, will receive prestigious awards from ACM. They will be formally honored at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 11 in San Francisco.

Ron Perrott will receive ACM's prestigious Distinguished Service Award. He was selected by his peers for providing vision and leadership in high performance computing and e-science, championing new initiatives and advocating collaboration among interested groups at both national and international levels. Perrott's efforts to advance parallel processing include being chair of the UK's High Performance Computing Strategy Committee and a founding member of both Euro-Par, the premier European conference on parallel computing, and the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC). Perrott has been consistently at the forefront of the promotion of high performance computing since he worked at the NASA Ames Research Center in the 1970s on what is regarded as the world's first high performance computer, the ILLIAC IV. Perrott is a visiting professor at the Oxford e-Research Centre and a former director of the Belfast e-Science Centre. He has been named a Fellow of ACM, IEEE and British Computing Society.

Armando Fox, an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for contributions to computing education through leadership and curriculum development in international online education; creating innovative courses, tools and inexpensive textbooks for software engineering; and outstanding teaching. Fox is a leader in the Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) field. At UC Berkeley, he designed and launched a MOOC on software engineering that has bestowed 20,000 earned certificates and attracted 300,000 auditors from around the world. Pearson Education is the financial sponsor of the Karlstrom Award, which carries a $10,000 prize.

ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Recognizes Young Researchers

Julian Shun has won ACM's 2015 Doctoral Dissertation Award for Shared-Memory Parallelism Can Be Simple, Fast, and Scalable, in which he proposed a new method of writing scalable parallel programs that run efficiently both in theory and in practice. His three-pronged approach includes proposing tools and techniques for deterministic parallel programming; the introduction of Ligra, the first high-level shared-memory framework for parallel graph traversal algorithms; and presenting new algorithms for a variety of important problems on graphs and strings that are both efficient in theory and practice.

Shun is a post-doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, which nominated him for this award. He will receive the Doctoral Dissertation Award and its $20,000 prize at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 11 in San Francisco.

Honorable Mention for the 2015 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award goes to Aaron Sidford of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for Iterative Methods, Combinatorial Optimization, and Linear Programming Beyond the Universal Barrier, and Siavash Mirarab of the University of Texas at Austin for Novel Scalable Approaches for Multiple Sequence Alignment and Phylogenomic Reconstruction. They will share a $10,000 prize. Google is the financial sponsor of the Doctoral Dissertation Award and Honorable Mention.

ACM Presidential Awards Recognize Leaders in Education and European Outreach

ACM has announced the recipients of honors for making strides in computer science education and European outreach. Chris Stephenson and Gerhard Schimpf will receive 2016 ACM Presidential Awards at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 11 in San Francisco.

Chris Stephenson, Head of Computer Science Education Programs at Google Inc., was recognized for being "a true visionary and teaching advocate who spirited ACM's lifelong commitment to computer science education, recognizing the need to introduce CS to young students taught by educators with the tools and training to inspire future generations to the wonders of computing." Her work in creating an international organization dedicated to supporting teachers and pursuing excellence in CS education for K-12 students has benefited ACM, teachers, and students worldwide. As the architect and first executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), she led the charge that changed the way CS education is appreciated at the K-12 level.

Gerhard Schimpf, who serves as Chair of ACM Europe's Council of European Chapter Leaders, was recognized for "his leadership in support of ACM's mission for global expansion by helping to establish ACM Europe, advocating ACM's involvement in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, and enlightening students and professionals throughout Europe to the value of ACM membership." Schimpf is being honored for his global vision and tireless devotion to ACM for more than four decades, demonstrated by his work to increase ACM's visibility across Europe. He was a leading supporter of ACM Europe, serving on the first ACM Europe Council in 2009. He was also instrumental in making ACM one of the founding organizations of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, an annual gathering of top students and foremost scientists in the field, including ACM's Turing Award recipients.

ACM and IEEE Computer Society Honor Uri Weiser with 2016 Eckert-Mauchly Award

ACM and the IEEE Computer Society will jointly present the 2016 Eckert-Mauchly Award to Uri Weiser for leadership, as well as pioneering industry and academic work in high performance processors and multimedia architectures, at the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) in Seoul, Korea next month. In a nearly 40-year career that has included roles in government, industry and academia, Weiser has made seminal contributions, including defining the first Intel Pentium processor architecture and being a recognized leader in asymmetric and heterogeneous manycore architecture.
Read the ACM news release.

Team from Russia Takes Top Spot in ACM ICPC Programming Contest

St. Petersburg State University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Harvard University and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology were the top medal winners in the 2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), which concluded May 19 in Thailand. The first-place winners were students from St. Petersburg State University in Russia.

ACM-ICPC, the premier global competition for programming, aims to recognize the best and the brightest young programmers from universities around the world. As the world's largest, oldest and most prestigious programming contest, ACM-ICPC attracts and unites a diverse group of young coding participants in competition. The Finals—which pit teams of three university students against nine complex problems and a demanding five-hour deadline—are the culmination of regional contests held througout the year. Teams from nearly 3,000 universities from 102 countries competed for the top prizes.

"As computer science gains greater importance across many sectors in society, we need to work towards encouraging innovation," said ACM President Alexander L. Wolf. "Through this competition, we give students the opportunity to gain valuable experience by applying their skills in challenging scenarios; work with mentors to hone those skills; and make connections for a lifetime. We also believe that the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest can act as a springboard for students to launch successful careers."

Full results of the competition are available here.

Read the news release.

AWARDS

2016 Gödel Prize Recognizes Major Advances in Verification of Concurrent Programs

of the 2016 Gödel Prize for their invention of Concurrent Separation Logic. The prize will be presented in July at the 43rd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2016). Brookes, a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and O'Hearn, an Engineering Manager at Facebook and a professor of Computer Science at University College London, were recognized for their separate papers on the idea of Concurrent Separation Logic (CSL), which has had a far-reaching impact in both theoretical and practical realms. The Gödel Prize is named in honor of Kurt Gödel, whose work has had immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century.
Read the ACM news release.

Nancy Lynch Elected to US National Academy of Science

Nancy Lynch, the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been elected to the US National Academy of Science, joining 84 new members and 21 foreign associates in this distinction. Lynch is an ACM Fellow and a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. Other honors include the Donald E. Knuth Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the Foundations of Computer Science, jointly awarded by the ACM and IEEE, and two Edsger W. Dijkstra Prizes for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing.

Award Nomination Deadline: ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award

The ACM–IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award was established in memory of Ken Kennedy, the founder of Rice University's nationally ranked computer science program and one of the world's foremost experts on high-performance computing. It recognizes outstanding contributions to programmability or productivity in high-performance computing, together with significant community service or mentoring contributions. The award is presented annually at a conference of the awardee's choice and is accompanied by a prize of $5,000. Nominations are due July 1.

MEMBER RECOGNITION

Call for ACM Senior and Distinguished Member 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 June 3. Please read Advice to Those Seeking ACM Senior Members by former Senior Member Committee Chair Susan Rodger on how to submit a strong nomination package.

The Distinguished Member designation recognizes ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous ACM Professional membership who have demonstrated significant accomplishments or made a significant impact on the computing field. The deadline for nominations is August 1. Please read Advice to Members Seeking ACM Distinction, by past Committee Co-chairs Marc Snir and Telle Whitney.

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 35 distinct technological fields. Some awards presented (or to be presented) at recent conferences:

CONFERENCES AND EVENTS

Applicative 2016, June 1 to 2, New York, NY

The ACM Applicative conference brings together researchers and practitioners to share the latest technologies and trends in computing. The conference is split into two tracks: one for application developers and one for systems software developers. The application development track has speakers from leading technology companies talking about how they are applying new technologies to the products they deliver. Scheduled speakers include Adam Arsenault and Yasha Podeswa of Hootsuite; Brad Green and Sameer Ajmani of Google; Chris Meiklejohn of Université Catholique De Louvain; Lucas Krause of Magenic; Stepan Parunashvili of Facebook; Leah Hanson of Stripe; and Steve Klabnik of Mozilla. The systems track will explore topics that enable systems-level practitioners to build better software for the modern world. Scheduled speakers include Andi Kleen of Intel; Brendan Gregg and Scott Long of Netflix; Mark Callaghan and Dave Watson of Facebook; Davidlohr Bueso of SuSE; Mohamed Zahran of New York University; Paul Khuong of AppNexus; Michael Freedman of Princeton University; and Paul McKenney of IBM. Topics will include microservices, the history of the Rust programming language, futex scaling for multicore systems, and much more. Register here.

DAC 2016, June 5 to 9, Austin, Texas

As the premier conference for the design and automation of electronic systems, the Design Automation Conference offers workshops on many aspects of design, including cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things, and image recognition. Keynotes will be delivered by Lars Reger of NXP Semiconductors; Sameer Halepete of NVIDIA; Mark Papermaster of Advanced Micro Devices; and Peter Stone of the University of Texas at Austin. Other invited speakers are Rikky Muller of the University of California, Berkeley and Cortera Neurotechnologies; Lou Scheffer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Krste Asanovic of the University of California, Berkeley and SiFive, Inc.; Bryan Payne of Netflix; and Kenneth Shepard of Columbia University.

ISCA 2016, June 18 to 22, Seoul, Korea

The 43rd International Symposium on Computer Architecture is the premier forum for new ideas and research results in computer architecture. Sessions will cover Neural Networks, Heterogeneous Architecture/Approximate Computing, Caches, Hardware Design, Accelerators, GPUs, Virtualization, Reliability, Microarchitecture, Datacenters, Memory, Emerging Architectures, and more. Workshops and tutorials will allow attendees to focus on more specific topics. Keynotes and lightning talks will also be featured.

STOC 2016, June 19 to 21, Cambridge, Massachusetts

The 48th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing will include the First International Workshop on Geometry and Machine Learning, the Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG), and talks by Santosh Vempala (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Timothy Chan (University of Waterloo).

SIGMOD/PODS 2016, June 26 to July 1, San Francisco, California

and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. Keynotes will be delivered by Moshe Vardi of Rice University, Editor-in-Chief of the Communications of the ACM; Sara Cohen of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and Frank Neven of Hasselt University.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2016, December 5 to 8, Macao

The 9th ACM SIGGRAPH Asia conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques is the premier platform for the advancement of graphics, animation, art, and technology in Asia. Visit the call for submissions page for information on submitting your work.

MEMBER PROGRAMS

Become an Ambassador for ACM—You Could Be a Grand Prize Winner!

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. The 2015–2016 Ambassadors for ACM program offers 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. Please consider becoming an Ambassador for ACM.

ACM Members can enjoy exclusive discounts on books and journals from leading publishers including Applied Computer Research, CLSI Publications, Morgan Kaufmann, and Springer; courses from NYU-Poly and Stevens Institute of Technology; certification exams from CompTIA; and much more. Find member discounts here.

LEARNING CENTER

Watch June 17 Webcast with Adrian Cockroft: "The Evolution of Microservices"

Register to watch the next free ACM webinar, The Evolution of Microservices, to be presented on Friday, June 17 at 12 pm ET by Adrian Cockroft, Technology Fellow at Battery Ventures and a founding member of eBay Research Labs.

ACM Learning Webinars are free with registration, available for streaming on all major mobile devices, and are recorded for on-demand viewing.

New eBook Titles from Morgan Kaufmann and Syngress

New books have recently been added to the Morgan Kaufmann and Syngress eBook collection, which now numbers more than 500 titles. Student and Professional ACM members can access them through the ACM Learning Center eBook catalog as well as the ACM Digital Library. New titles include:

  • Data Analysis in the Cloud: Models, Techniques and Applications
  • Data Architecture: A Primer for the Data Scientist Big Data, Data Warehouse and Data Vault
  • Digital Design and Computer Architecture: ARM Edition
  • Digital Identity Management
  • Emerging Trends in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and Systems Biology: Algorithms and Software Tools
  • Introduction to Statistical Machine Learning
  • Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming
  • Learning Processing: A Beginner's Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction
  • Predictive Analytics and Data Mining: Concepts and Practice with RapidMiner
  • Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt
  • Security Controls Evaluation, Testing, and Assessment Handbook
  • Topics in Parallel and Distributed Computing: Introducing Concurrency in Undergraduate Courses

New Safari Books and Videos

Check out the latest book and video titles from Safari Books Online, recently added to the ACM Learning Center eBook collection. You'll find new and updated coverage of topics such as Android Programming, AngularJS, Apache Spark, Big Data, CISSP, Docker, Data Science, Functional Programming, Go, Hadoop, Haskell, iOS 9 and Swift, Linux, Microservices, Python, R Programming, and Spring.

See the Learning Center's full collection of eBooks.

New Skillsoft Books and Videos

New books covering the latest IT skills and technologies are always being added to the ACM Skillsoft Learning Collections. Here are some of the notable titles recently added to our library:

  • Beginning ASP.NET for Visual Studio 2015
  • Building a Scalable Data Warehouse with Data Vault 2.0
  • C# 24-Hour Trainer, 2nd Edition
  • Developing Essbase Applications: Hybrid Techniques and Practices
  • Fraud Analytics Using Descriptive, Predictive, and Social Network Techniques: A Guide to Data Science for Fraud Detection
  • MySQL for the Internet of Things
  • Pro PHP and jQuery, 2nd Edition
  • Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists, 2nd Edition
  • Professional Python
  • Tableau for Dummies

Recently, Skillsoft added significant video content in knowledge areas including A+ Practical; Apache Storm Introduction; ARCH; IINS; Introduction to ASP.NET Core 1.0; LoopBack Node.js Framework; Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite; Oracle Database 12c Revisions; REST API; RHCVA; Titanium; Using Adobe Typekit; Vagrant Development Environments; Universal Windows Platform; Universal Windows Platform—App Architecture and UX/UI with C#; Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management; and VMware NSX Network Virtualization.

See the Skillsoft Learning Collections page for more information on books and videos. A more comprehensive list of recently added book titles is available here (see sidebar).

Member Discount on EMC Courseware

ACM has partnered with EMC to bring members a 15% discount on practical training in some of today's most vital IT knowledge areas, such as Big Data, Cloud Computing, Information Storage and Management, Virtualization, and more. These EMC courses focus on technology, not products, to teach technology topics applicable to any vendor environment. Training is available in various modalities, including eLearning, instructor-led (ILT), online ILT, video ILT, and video ILT-stream. For the list of eligible courses and the discount code, visit the EMC courses page.

ACM CAREER & JOB CENTER

ACM's Career & Job Center and CSTA Job Board Offer Indispensable Job Search Tools

Be sure to visit ACM's Career & Job Center to update your résumé or create a new one in the Résumé Bank, so that employers can find you. ACM members' résumés include an ACM logo on their entry, highlighting their ACM membership to employers. 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). Log in to ACM's Job Board and post your résumé today.

Computer Science Teachers Association members: Be sure to visit the CSTA Job Board to create and upload your résumé to the Résumé Bank so that employers find you. Log in and post your résumé today!

ACM and CSTA members: Set up job alerts specifying your skills, interests, and location to receive email notifications when a job is posted that matches your criteria. For more information about the ACM Career & Job Center or CSTA Job Board, please contact Jennifer Ruzicka.

EDUCATION

New Framework to Define K-12 Computer Science Education: Second Full Review

ACM, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), and Code.org are joining forces with more than 100 advisors within the computing community to develop a framework that will identify key K-12 computer science concepts and practices educators should expect students exiting grades 2, 5, 8, and 12 to know. Educators are invited to participate. The initial review period is closed, but there will be second full review period in June. Visit the K-12 CS framework site for more information.

2015-2016 ACM NDC Study Call for Participation

The 2015-16 ACM NDC Study of non-Ph.D. granting four-year institutions is open. Now in its fourth year, NDC reaches more than 1,000 US academic units and produces timely data on enrollment, degree production, student body composition, and faculty salaries/demographics that can impact your institution/program(s) and its administration. If your unit has a program in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Information Technology, and/or Software Engineering but has not received an invitation to participate, please email Yan Timanovsky.

STUDENT NEWS

ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals Winners

The ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), sponsored by Microsoft, has announced its Grand Finals winners. There are two rounds of competition at each conference hosting an SRC, which culminates in a Grand Finals competition. All undergraduate and graduate student winners from the SRCs held during the year advance to the SRC Grand Finals, where they are evaluated by a different panel of judges via the Web. This year's SRC Grand Finals winners are:

Graduate Category:
First Place: Swarnendu Biswas, Ohio State University, "Valor: Efficient, Software-Only Region Conflict Exceptions" (PLDI 2015)
Second Place: Thomas Degueule, INRIA, "Interoperability and Composition of DSLs with Melange" (Modularity 2015)
Third Place: Christopher Theisen, North Carolina State University, "Risk-Based Attack Surface Approximation" (ESEC/FSE 2015)
Undergraduate Category:
First Place: Jeevana Priya Inala, MIT, "Type Assisted Synthesis of Recursive Transformers on Algebraic Datatypes" (PDLI 2015)

The winners are invited, along with their advisors, to attend the annual ACM Awards Banquet in San Francisco, California on June 11, where they will receive formal recognition.

ACM Presents Special Awards to 2016 Intel Science Fair Finalists

ACM presented six Special Awards to finalists in the 2016 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), the world's largest high school science research competition, held May 8-13 in Phoenix, Arizona. More than 1,700 young entrepreneurs, innovators and scientists from more than 75 countries, regions and territories competed to reach the finals. All winners receive complimentary ACM student memberships for the duration of their undergraduate education. Here are ACM's ISEF Special Award winners and their breakthrough research topics:

First Award of $1,000:
"Multi-Goal Motion Planning for Steerable Surgical Needles"
David Jonathan Gardner, 17, Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Greenbelt, Maryland
 
Second Award of $500:
"A Universal Automated Algorithm for the Generation of Potent Antimicrobial Peptides"
Gwenda Law, 17, Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake High School, Burnt Hills, New York
 
Third Award of $300:
"Efficient Blockchain-Driven Multiparty Computation Markets at Scale"
Charles Noyes, 17, Villa Park High School, Villa Park, California
 
Fourth Award of $200:
"A Machine Learning Approach to Identifying Ordered Binding Regions on Order-Disorder Protein Interfaces"
Jake Yee Cui, 17, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, Virginia
 
"User Authentication Based on Gait Analysis"
Chloe Baker, 16, Lake Braddock Secondary School, Burke, Virginia
 
"Developing Operating System for High-Performance Computing with a Hardware Approach to the Transactional Memory Support"
Wojciech Krzysztof Rozowski, 17, Liceum Ogolnoksztalcace im. Tadeusza Kosciuszki w Krzeszowicach, Krzeszowice, Poland

Apply for 2016 Cutler-Bell Prize for Excellence in High School Computing

Every year, the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing recognizes talented high school students in computer science. The intent of the program is to promote and encourage the field of computer science, as well as to empower young and aspiring learners to pursue computing challenges outside of the traditional classroom environment.

The application process involves a Challenge that focuses on having the student develop an artifact that engages modern computing technology and computer science. Judges will be looking for submissions that demonstrate ingenuity, complexity, relevancy, originality, and a desire to further computer science as a discipline. The application period closes November 1. If you need inspiration, check out last year's winners and their projects!

Four winners will be selected and each will be awarded a $10,000 prize and cost of travel to the annual ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing Reception, where students will demonstrate their programs and discuss their work. The prizes are funded by a $1 million endowment established by David Cutler and Gordon Bell.

Winners of the 2016 Cutler-Bell Prize will be notified via email in January 2017.

Upcoming ACM Student Research Competitions: Submission Deadlines

ACM Student Research Competitions (SRCs), sponsored by Microsoft, 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 MOBILESoft 2016.

The next conferences accepting submissions are:

Learn about more competitions on the SRC submissions page.

ACM-W Student Scholarships for Attendance at Research Conferences

The ACM Women's Council (ACM-W) provides support for women undergraduate or graduate students in computer science and related programs who wish to attend research conferences. This exposure to the computer science research world can encourage a student to continue on to the next level (Undergraduate to Graduate, Masters to Ph.D., Ph.D. to an industry or academic position). The student does not have to present a paper at the conference she attends. Students can apply an unlimited number of times; however, once a student receives an award, she is no longer eligible for future ACM-W scholarships.

The ACM-W scholarships are divided between scholarships of up to $600 for intra-continental conference travel, and scholarships of up to $1200 for intercontinental conference travel. Scholarship applications are evaluated in six groups each year, in order to distribute awards across a range of conferences.

ACM-W encourages the student's home department to match the scholarship award and recognize the student's achievement locally within their department. In addition, if the award is for attendance at one of several ACM Special Interest Group conferences (SIGACCESS, SIGACT, SIGARCH, SIGCOMM, SIGCHI, SIGCSE, SIGDA, SIGECOM, SIGEVO, SIGGRAPH, SIGHPC, SIGIR, SIGITE, SIGMM, SIGMOBILE, SIGOPS, SIGPLAN, and SIGSOFT), the SIG will provide complimentary conference registration and a mentor during the conference. The number of free registrations available varies from SIG to SIG. The 2015-2016 scholarships are made possible by generous support from Google, Microsoft Research, and Oracle.

For application form, notification dates and more information, please visit the scholarships page.

Graduating Students Eligible for Special Transition Rate

ACM offers a special ACM Professional Membership for $49 USD (regularly $99) to help graduating students make the transition to professional careers, and take advantage of continuous learning opportunities, including free online books and courses and access to ACM's Career & Job Center. This one-year-only transition rate includes all the benefits of Professional Membership plus the option of purchasing a Digital Library subscription for $50. Recent graduates can access this special transition offer through ACM's convenient online renewal form, or by following the instructions on the paper renewal form. For more information, visit the Reasons to Transition to Professional Membership page.

DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS PROGRAM

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 Richard Stallman. Stallman launched the Free Software Movement in 1983 and began development of the GNU operating system in 1984. GNU is free as in freedom (libre): everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today.

Stallman has received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award and Software System Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, and the Premio Extremadura al Conocimiento Libre, as well as several doctorates honoris causa. He has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Available lectures include A Free Digital Society: What Makes Digital Inclusion Good or Bad?; Computing, Freedom and Privacy; Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks; Free Software and Your Freedom; Should We Have More Surveillance than the USSR?; The Danger of Software Patents; and The GNU General Public License.

For more information on Richard Stallman, please visit his DSP speaker information page.
Richard Stallman's Digital Library author page.

ACM, IEEE Computer Society Share Distinguished Speakers Programs

IEEE-CS and ACM are sharing 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 on the DVP site. Make sure you identify yourself as an ACM chapter or event.

CHAPTERS NEWS

Notice to Chapters: Submit Your Annual Reports

ACM's fiscal year is coming to a close which means it is time to submit your ACM Annual Report. The report is for the fiscal year 2016 (July 1, 2015 - June 30, 2016).

To complete the report online, you must log in with your unique chapter web account at http://www.acm.org/chapters/chapters/interface. Please note, your chapter web account is entirely separate from your personal web account and should be accessible to all officers.

If you are unsure of your chapter web account or need to reset the password, please follow this link: https://campus.acm.org/public/account/signin.cfm.

Please also take this time to update your chapter's contact information, including your membership list (under the Chapter Members tab) and officers (under the Chapter Officers tab.) You can utilize our edit features to extend memberships, update email addresses, or cancel past members who are no longer part of your chapter. Keeping your membership list current and up to date is important. It ensures that all members receive the maximum benefits they are entitled to and are kept aware of all the latest ACM happenings and resources.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to 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 April 15 to May 12, 2016:

ACM Student Chapters:

  • Alfred State College ACM Student Chapter, Alfred, New York
  • Bucknell University ACM-W Student Chapter, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
  • BUITEMS ACM Student Chapter, Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences, Quetta, Pakistan
  • California Polytechnic State University Pomona ACM-W Student Chapter
  • Columbus State University ACM-W Student Chapter, Columbus, Georgia
  • GCE Karad ACM Student Chapter, Government College of Engineering, Karad, India
  • IIIT-Sri City ACM Student Chapter, Indian Institute of Information Technology
  • Minnesota State University Mankato ACM Student Chapter
  • Monmouth University ACM-W Student Chapter, West Long Branch, New Jersey
  • Nazeer Hussain University ACM Student Chapter, Karachi, Pakistan
  • North Carolina A&T State University ACM Student Chapter, Greensboro
  • Pontificia Universidad Javeriana ACM-W Student Chapter, Bogota, Colombia
  • Presbyterian College ACM Student Chapter, Clinton, South Carolina
  • Rowan University ACM Student Chapter, Glassboro, New Jersey
  • University of Bath ACM-W Student Chapter, UK
  • University of Toronto iSchool ACM Student Chapter, Toronto, ON, Canada
  • University of Victoria ACM-W Student Chapter, Victoria, BC, Canada
  • UOIT ACM-W Student Chapter, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, ON, Canada
  • Walla Walla University ACM Student Chapter, College Place, Washington

ACM Professional Chapters:

  • CMOBILE ACM Chapter, Shanghai, China
  • Amaravathi ACM Chapter, Guntur, India
  • Bhiwani ACM Chapter, Bhiwani, India
  • Bhopal ACM Chapter, Bhopal, India

ACM-W NEWS

Reports from New York and Southern California Celebrations

NYC-CWiC 2016
By ACM-W Celebrations Chair Wendy Powley
On April 1, ACM-W, the New York Technology Council and the CUNY Institute for Software Design and Development presented the First Annual New York City ACM-W Conference for Women Computer Science Students (NYC-CWiC). The daylong event was hosted by Microsoft at the Microsoft Technology Center in Times Square, New York City, and was sponsored by Microsoft, Google, Verizon, NY Tech Meetup, and LiveCube.com. Over 150 students, educators, and professionals attended the event.

The four keynote speakers were Heather Shapiro, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft; Bonnie John, Senior Interaction Designer at Bloomberg, L.P.; Judith Spitz, Verizon Executive in Residence at Cornell Tech and former CIO at Verizon; and Margaret Wright, Silver Professor of Computer Science at New York University.

Over 20 moderators and panelists spoke on the topics of career choices, entrepreneurship, and building a network for one's career. The day ended with a panel answering questions from attendees. The consensus among the attendees, organizers, producers, and sponsors was that the event was very successful, and planning for next year's event is already underway.

CWIC-SoCal 2016
By Pallavi Meharia, University of Cincinnati
The third Southern California Celebration of Women in Computing (CWIC-SoCal), held April 9 and 10 in Ventura, hosted approximately 190 participants. Industry sponsors (AppFolio, MarkLogic, Google, Microsoft, Raytheon, MINDBODY, and Amazon) and academic sponsors (California Polytechnic State University Computer Science Department and Harvey Mudd College) were represented in the conference program in various ways, as lightning talk presenters, panel members or participants in the job fair.

The day-and-a-half program included two keynotes by Tannaz Sassooni, who works in visual effects and animation technology, and Chandra Krintz, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-founder and Chief Scientist of AppScale Systems, Inc. Student talks, workshops, panel presentations, a job fair and poster session, and a social activity rounded out the program. Some of the sessions that garnered very positive audience participation included panels on "Outreach Activities and Opportunities," "Careers in Industry," and "Work-Life Balance"; the job fair; a social activity focused on creating drawable circuits and card houses; and a workshop on "Supporting and Growing a Student-Run Club for Women in Computing." The overall feedback about the conference was very positive, with many students thanking the organizers for the opportunity to learn more about jobs or research areas in computing. Student presenters expressed gratitude for a friendly venue to present work, and to ask questions of industry representatives about quality of life, balance and opportunities. Overall, the conference was a warm and celebratory event. The student participants from Cal Poly who assisted with the webpage, t-shirt design, and social event greatly assisted in many of the conference tasks, and we recommend that high student engagement is a plus for future organizers.

ACM-W Celebrations are local events that showcase female role models, encourage mentoring and networking, supply accurate information about computing careers, and create opportunities for women to present their research, often for the first time in their careers. Many of these events include poster competitions for undergraduate and graduate students to present their research and project work. You can find information on starting new Celebrations and conference planning resources on the ACM-W Celebrations site. Please contact Wendy Powley for any additional assistance.

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.

Also read the ACM-W Connections newsletter for updates on ACM-W programs: local celebrations, scholarships and awards, chapters, and more.

PUBLICATIONS NEWS

CACM Relaunches Mobile Site

Communications of the ACM got a facelift this month with the launch of a responsive mobile website. The updated site accommodates members' moves to mobile platforms—36% of CACM's online traffic came from mobile phones or tablets this year, up from 18 percent three years ago. A drop-down menu provides quick access to content, and a homepage widget displays the latest issue. Members viewing from a tablet have additional interface options, including a sliding navigation bar.

ACM Publications Seeking New Editors-in-Chief

ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS) is seeking a new Editor-in-Chief. Nominations are due May 31.

ACM interactions is seeking a new Editor-in-Chief. Nominations are due June 1.

Computer Systems Organization and Human-Centered Computing Category Editors Needed for ACM Computing Reviews

Computing Reviews, the post-publication review and comment journal of ACM, is seeking volunteer editors interested in serving as category editors for two areas: Computer Systems Organization and Human-Centered Computing.

New ACM Journals Accepting Submissions

The new ACM journal ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems (TCPS) is accepting submissions for special issues on Smart Homes, Internet of Things, and Medical Cyber-Physical Systems.

The new ACM journal ACM Transactions on Social Computing (TSC) is accepting submissions on work that covers the full spectrum of social computing including theoretical, empirical, systems, and design research contributions.

acmqueue Presents: "Should You Upload or Ship Big Data to the Cloud?"

Sachin Date explains how the increasing availability of gigabit-speed Internet connections, along with the explosive growth in data-transfer speeds, opens up more possibilities for moving Big Data into the cloud. It is accepted wisdom that when the data you wish to move into the cloud is at terabyte scale and beyond, you are better off shipping it to the cloud provider, rather than uploading it. The acmqueue article takes an analytical look at how shipping and uploading strategies compare, the various factors on which they depend, and under what circumstances you are better off shipping or uploading data.

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