ACM MemberNet - November 29, 2022

Welcome to the November 2022 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 past issues of MemberNet online in our archive.

Read coverage of ACM in the news media.

November 29, 2022

Organize an Hour of Code in Your Community During Computer Science Education Week, December 5–11

The Hour of Code has introduced more than one and a half billion students in more than 180 countries to computer science. It is a global movement designed to generate excitement in young people about programming and technology, taking place during Computer Science Education Week, December 5–11, with games, tutorials, and other experiences organized by local volunteers from schools, research institutions, and other groups. CSEdWeek is the perfect time to inspire students and their families to learn more about computer science, connect with others in the CS community, and take part in the scheduled events along with millions around the world.

Anyone anywhere can organize an Hour of Code event, and anyone from ages 4 to 104 can enjoy any of a number of fun, engaging, and educational projects which are available in several languages. Learn more about how to host an Hour of Code and how to promote an event.

The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) will kick off CSEdWeek with a panel comprised of its 2022 CS Heroes who will discuss their own journeys to computer science, what has inspired them, and their recommendations for how we can continue to advance so that every student has an equal opportunity to learn computer science. The event will be live-streamed on December 5, at 1 pm EST (6 pm UTC). Register here.

ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling Now Accepting Nominations

To highlight and encourage more research focused on modelling the devastating impact of climate change, ACM has established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling. The new award aims to recognize innovative parallel computing contributions toward solving the global climate crisis. As Gordon Bell explained, "With more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than at any time in human history, sea levels rising faster than ever before, and extreme weather events that destroy everything in their wake, there is no denying that we are in a climate crisis. Climate modelling can’t reverse this trend. But it offers us the best possible blueprint to understand where we are and where we’re heading."

Climate scientists and software engineers will be evaluated for the award based on the performance and innovation in their computational methods. Nominated projects should demonstrably improve climate modelling and enhance the understanding of the Earth’s climate system. Nominations may be submitted online here. The deadline to apply for the inaugural award is April 15, 2023.

For more information, read the news release.

In Memoriam: Fred Brooks

Fred Brooks, best known for managing the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package, died on November 17 at age 91. Brooks received the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 1999 for landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering. In his classic text on software engineering, The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks described the lessons he learned leading the software team that developed the System/360 operating system. It is from that experience that Brooks proposed "Brooks' Law": that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."

AWARDS

2022 Gordon Bell Prizes Awarded at SC22

A 16-member team drawn from French, Japanese, and US institutions was awarded the 2022 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their project, "Pushing the Frontier in the Design of Laser-Based Electron Accelerators With Groundbreaking Mesh-Refined Particle-In-Cell Simulations on Exascale-Class Supercomputers." In their prize-winning work, the researchers presented a first-of-kind mesh-refined (MR) massively parallel Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code for kinetic plasma simulations optimized on the Frontier, Fugaku, Summit, and Perlmutter supercomputers.

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize tracks the progress of parallel computing and rewards innovation in applying high-performance computing to challenges in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics. The award was presented during the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC22).

Read the ACM news release.

Also at SC22, the 2022 ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for High-Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research was presented to a 34-member team for their project, "GenSLMs: Genome-Scale Language Models Reveal SARS-Cov-2 Evolutionary Dynamics," which seeks to transform how new and emergent variants of pandemic-causing viruses, especially SARS-CoV-2, are identified and classified. This special prize is being awarded to recognize outstanding research achievement toward the understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic through the use of high-performance computing.

Read the ACM news release.

Watch Jack Dongarra's ACM A.M. Turing Award Lecture On Demand

2021 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Jack Dongarra delivered his Turing Lecture Nov. 15 at the 2022 International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC22). In the lecture "A Not So Simple Matter of Software," Dongarra examines how high-performance computing has changed over the last 40 years, looks toward future trends, and discusses how a new generation of software libraries and algorithms is needed to use dynamic, distributed, and parallel environments effectively. The lecture is now available on demand.

Call for Nominations for 2022 ACM Awards

ACM seeks your help in building and diversifying the nomination pool for our 2022 Awards. 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 is that the person was never nominated. We ask that members help distribute this ACM Awards Call for Nominations to your network through distribution lists, related organizations, and individual contacts to help ensure that deserving candidates are nominated. It is also asked that ACM's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion be taken into consideration when nominating. While candidates for advanced member grades (Fellow or Distinguished Member) must be ACM members, candidates for ACM Awards do not need to be members to be nominated. Nominations are due December 15, 2022.

For a list of all ACM awards, information about each award, and their categories, please visit the ACM Awards Webpage.

MEMBER RECOGNITION

Call for ACM Senior 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. Nominations are accepted on a quarterly basis. The deadline for nominations is December 3.

SIG NEWS

Applications for the AAAI/ACM SIGAI New and Future AI Educator Program

The 13th Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI), AAAI, and ACM SIGAI are pleased to announce the AAAI/ACM SIGAI New and Future AI Educator Program for 2023, sponsored by ACM SIGAI and AAAI. The New and Future AI Educator Program provides partial travel support for new educators (early career lecturers, assistant professors, and other university or secondary school faculty) and future educators (full-time PhD candidates or postdocs at colleges and universities who intend a career in academia) to attend EAAI-23, co-located with AAAI-23. Applications are due December 14, 2022. Apply here.

FCRC 2023, June 16–23, 2023

The 2023 ACM Federated Computing Research Conference will assemble a spectrum of affiliated research conferences and workshops into a week-long, co-located meeting in Orlando, Florida, USA. This model retains the advantages of the smaller conferences while at the same time facilitating communication among researchers in different fields of computer science and engineering. Each morning FCRC will feature a joint plenary talk on topics of broad appeal to the computing research community. The technical program for each affiliated conference will be independently administered, and each is responsible for its own meeting's structure, content, and proceedings. To the extent facilities allow, attendees are free to attend technical sessions of other affiliated conferences co-located with their "home" conference.

SIG AWARDS

Best Paper Awards Given at Recent ACM SIG Conferences

ACM's Special Interest Groups (SIGs) regularly cite outstanding individuals for their contributions in 38 distinct technological fields. Some awards presented (or to be presented) at conferences:

You can find them all here.

CONFERENCES AND EVENTS

VRST 2022, November 29–December 1 (Hybrid)

The 28th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology is an international forum dedicated to virtual and augmented reality software and technology. Papers being presented cover subjects including "Virtual Humans, Collaboration, and Social Interaction," "Visualization and Displays," "Body Perception," and more. Scheduled keynote speakers are Pedro Lopes (University of Chicago), Naoto Kato (Cluster, Inc.), and Daito Manabe, (Artist / DJ). The hybrid event is being held virtually and in-person in Tsukuba, Japan.

SPLASH 2022, December 5–10

The ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity embraces all aspects of software construction and delivery to make it the premier conference at the intersection of programming, languages, and software engineering. Scheduled keynote speakers are Takashi Iba (Keio University), ACM Fellow Mary Shaw (Carnegie Mellon University), Atsushi Igarashi (Kyoto University), and Robert O’Callahan (Google Research). The conference is being held in Auckland, New Zealand.

CoNEXT 2022, December 6–9

The 18th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies will be a major forum for presentations and discussions of novel networking technologies that will shape the future of Internetworking. The conference is single track and features a high-quality technical program with significant opportunities for individual and small-group technical and social interactions among a diverse set of participants. Keynote speakers are Manya Ghobadi (MIT), Matthias Waehlisch (Freie Universität Berlin), and Marco Chiesa (KTH Royal Institute of Technology). This year's conference is being held in Roma, Italy.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2022, December 6–9

The ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques will feature paper and poster presentations, a computer animation festival, speakers from industry and academia, an art gallery, business symposiums, courses, and more. Keynote speakers for the event will be Luc Julia ("There is No Such Thing as Artificial Intelligence"), and Sean Lee ("Changes in the Visual Arts Market Brought About by Realistic Content Technology"). This year's conference is being held in Daegu, South Korea.

WSC 2022, December 11–14

Under the theme "Reimagine Tomorrow," the 2022 Winter Simulation Conference will feature in-person exhibits and hybrid networking events, as well as programs ranging from introductory tutorials to state-of-the-art research and practice. A keynote panel session will feature Kenneth Lim (Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore), Ngien Hoon Ping (SMRT Corporation Ltd.), and Ong Kim Pong (PSA International). Keynote speakers are Michael Fu (University of Maryland), Leon McGinnis (Georgia Tech), and Koen de Backer (Micron Technology). The event is being held in Singapore.

PUBLIC POLICY

Updated Europe/US Statement on Principles for Algorithmic Responsibility Endorsed by ACM Global Technology Council

While algorithmic systems hold the promise of making society more equitable, inclusive, and efficient, those results do not automatically flow from automation...It is imperative, therefore, that algorithmic systems comply fully with established legal, ethical, and scientific norms...

So begins a milestone new policy document adopted just after last month’s edition of MemberNet went to press. Jointly developed and approved by ACM’s Europe and US Technology Policy Committees, the new Statement on Principles for Responsible Algorithmic Systems updates the Committees’ frequently downloaded 2017 Statement on Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability. The new Statement also is the first to be endorsed by the ACM global Technology Policy Council created in 2018.

The new Statement goes on to identify multiple factors that can make algorithmic systems dangerously "opaque" and to specify several ways to "mitigate the risks of bias or inaccuracy inherent in the use of automated decision-making systems," including:

System builders and operators should adhere to the same standards in selecting inputs or architecting systems to which humans are held when making equivalent decisions
AI system developers should undertake extensive impact assessments prior to the deployment of AI systems
Policy makers should mandate that audit trails be used to achieve higher standards of accuracy, transparency, and fairness
Operators of AI systems should be held responsible for the decisions they make using the system regardless of whether algorithmic tools are used

The Statement also puts forward "Principles for Responsible Algorithmic Systems" grounded in the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. They address nine key issues: Legitimacy and Competency; Minimizing Harm; Security and Privacy; Transparency; Interpretability and Explainability; Maintainability; Contestability and Auditability; Accountability and Responsibility; and Limiting Environmental Impacts.

The lead authors of the new joint Statement were USTPC member Ricardo Baeza-Yates and "AI" Subcommittee Co-Chair Jeanna Matthews. Nearly two dozen other Europe and US Technology Policy Committee members also contributed to or commented on it.

For more information, please also see ACM’s related press release here.

USTPC Hosts Hot Topics Webinar on Algorithmic Responsibility

Algorithmic systems, often based on artificial intelligence, are increasingly being used globally by governments and companies to make or recommend decisions that have far-reaching effects on individuals, organizations, and society. While such systems hold the promise of making society more equitable, inclusive, and efficient, those results do not automatically flow from automation. Like decisions made by humans, machine-made ones can also fail to respect the rights of individuals and result in harmful discrimination and other negative effects.

Join a panel of ACM experts—Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Lorena Jaume-Palasi, Jeanna Matthews, and Alejandro Saucedo—moderated by Technology Policy Council Chair Jim Hendler on Thursday, December 1 from 3–4:30 pm EST (8–9:30 pm UTC) for a transatlantic deep dive into the Council’s brand-new joint Statement on Principles for Responsible Algorithmic Systems and an exploration of the legal, ethical, and scientific implications of life in the new machine age.

Connect with ACM's Tech Policy Groups!

To learn more about upcoming programs and the work of ACM's Technology Policy groups, follow @USTPC and @EuropeTPC on Twitter. If you're interested in contributing to the work of ACM's Europe or US Technology Policy Committees, please email [email protected].

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 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.

Featured Member Benefit: Credible Student Loan Marketplace

Did you know that you could potentially save thousands by refinancing your student loans? ACM has partnered with Credible to help you find out if you are overpaying on your student loans, and could potentially save thousands by refinancing. As a multi-lender marketplace that allows borrowers to receive personalized loan offers from its vetted lenders, Credible empowers consumers to take control of their student loans. Compare student loan refinancing rates from up to 10 lenders without affecting your credit score for free! Rates range from 2.48% to 11.87% APR. Reduce your rate, lower your payments, repay faster. You choose. To learn more, visit Credible.

ACM Academic Department Membership Option

The ACM Academic Department Membership option allows universities and colleges to provide ACM Professional Membership to their faculty at a greatly reduced collective cost. ACM offers a membership for academic department faculty at the cost of $49 per person, more than half off the standard ACM professional membership fee of $99 per year. Through this program, each faculty member will receive all the benefits of individual professional ACM membership, including Communications of the ACM, member rates to ACM Special Interest Group conferences, member subscription rates to ACM journals, and much more. To learn more, visit the ACM Academic Department Membership page or contact Cindy Ryan.

LEARNING CENTER

Pluralsight Training Now Available for ACM Members

ACM is happy to announce the latest member benefit for lifelong learning: the award-winning Pluralsight platform. You can access ACM’s custom collection of more than 2,000 courses, skill assessments, learning paths, and certification exam prep in the ACM Learning Center. ACM worked with Pluralsight to select resources that cover the most in-demand technical skills, frameworks, and certifications, and will periodically rotate in new content to ensure currency and breadth of coverage. And sometime in 2023, content is expected to be added from A Cloud Guru, the world's largest hands-on cloud learning library.

To access the Pluralsight library, visit the ACM Learning Center, click on Pluralsight in the top right corner, and log in with your member credentials.

Skillsoft’s Percipio Platform is Now Available

Skillsoft’s new Percipio platform is now available to ACM members. Percipio includes all the content you already enjoy in the current Skillport platform, as well as skill benchmarks, course assessments, practice labs, coding labs, cloud labs, and more. Learners consume content in whatever way makes sense for them—videos, books, audiobooks, practice labs, coding sandboxes, and more. Learners can also attend live events, tech and developer bootcamps, and instructor-led courses.

To access more than Skillsoft Percipio, visit the ACM Learning Center, click on Percipio in the top right corner, and log in with your member credentials.

ACM ByteCast Interviews Yaw Anokwa

ACM ByteCast is ACM's series of podcast interviews with researchers, practitioners, and innovators who are at the intersection of computing research and practice. In the latest episode, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes research scientist, software engineer, and entrepreneur Yaw Anokwa. Yaw is the founder and CEO of ODK (Open Data Kit), the offline data collection platform that helps fight disease, poverty, and inequity. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington. In his interview, Yaw describes how he felt the urge to pivot his career into a direction of positive social impact as a graduate student, how a volunteer experience with Partners in Health in Rwanda and a software engineering internship at Google showed him the potential for technology to empower people and change lives, the joy of working on a product that focuses on public good, and some principles that have helped him to succeed.

Listen to ACM ByteCast interviews here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Watch ACM TechTalk With Raquel Urtasun

Register now for the TechTalk, "An AI-First Approach to Accelerating Autonomous Trucking," taking place Wednesday, December 7, 12 pm EST (5 pm UTC). Founded in 2021 by world-leading AI pioneer Raquel Urtasun, Waabi is a next-generation autonomous vehicle company with a radically new AI-first approach to autonomous driving, starting with the trucking industry. In this talk, Urtasun will dive into the ground-breaking AI-first approach needed to accelerate autonomy, and what it takes to bring the promise of self-driving closer to commercialization than ever before.

Visit the TechTalks Archive for our full archive of past TechTalks.

STUDENT NEWS

Young Researchers: Apply for the 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum, September 24–29, 2023

The 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum will bring together some of the brightest minds in mathematics and computer science for an unrestrained, interdisciplinary exchange. During the weeklong conference, young researchers and other participants have the opportunity to connect with scientific pioneers and learn how the laureates made it to the top of their fields. Young researchers can apply to attend until Saturday, February 11, 2023. Application information can be found here.

US High School Students Encouraged to Apply for 2022-2023 ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize

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. Up to four winners will be selected and each will be awarded a $10,000 scholarship—funded by a $1 million endowment established by David Cutler and Gordon Bell—to be administered through the financial aid department at the university the student will attend. The application period closes January 27, 2023.

For more information and to apply visit here.

Upcoming ACM Student Research Competitions: Submission Deadlines

ACM Student Research Competitions (SRCs) 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 were presented at ICCAD ‘22. The next conferences accepting submissions are:

CGO 2023, February 25–March 1, 2023, deadline December 15, 2022
ICSE 2023, May 14–20, 2023, deadline December 30, 2022
CHI 2023, April 23–28, 2023, deadline January 19, 2023
PLDI 2023, June 19–21, 2023, deadline March 23, 2023

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

About the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program

Book the speaker for your next event through the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program (DSP) and deliver compelling and insightful content to your audience. ACM will cover the cost of transportation for the speaker to travel to your event. Our program features renowned thought leaders in academia, industry, and government speaking about the most important topics in the computing and IT world today. Our booking process is simple and convenient.

See ACM Distinguished Speakers in action on our Flickr page.

Featured ACM Distinguished Speaker: Zitao Liu

Zitao Liu is the Head of AI Lab at TAL Education Group, one of the largest leading education and technology enterprises in China. His research is in the area of machine learning, and includes contributions in the areas of artificial intelligence in education, multimodal knowledge representation, and user modeling. Specifically, he studies and develops AI approaches to tackle some of the hard-core problems in AIED, such as automatic short answer grading, knowledge tracing, dropout prediction, class activity detection, etc. His lecture topics include "AI, the Next Step for Education: Tech Innovations Making Our Classrooms Smarter.” He is available to speak through the ACM Distinguished Speaker Program.

For more information about Liu, please visit his DSP speaker information page.

CHAPTERS NEWS

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 the new chapters that were chartered October 17 through November 11, 2022:

ACM Student Chapters:

Clayton State University ACM Student Chapter, Morrow, Georgia, USA
Georgia Tech ACM Student Chapter, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Goa University ACM Student Chapter, Panaji, India
PSG ACM-W Student Chapter, Coimbatore, India
SITS Narhe ACM Student Chapter, Pune, India
University of Idaho ACM Student Chapter, Moscow, Idaho, USA
UTAS Ibri ACM Student Chapter, Ibri, Oman

ACM Professional Chapters:

Arts in HCI ACM SIGCHI Chapter, Kingston, United Kingdom
Bishkek ACM Chapter, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
Jakarta ACM Chapter, Jakarta, Indonesia

ACM-W NEWS

Above and Beyond Scholarship: Vetria Byrd, PhD

As a recipient of an ACM-W Scholarship, Vetria Byrd knows how much it means for women in computer science to set an example for future generations, and how impactful ACM-W can be in one’s life. A computer scientist and biomedical engineer by training and a visualization scientist by experience, Byrd is an Associate Professor of Computer Graphics Technology at Purdue University, the founder of BPViz: Broadening Participation in Visualization Workshop, and a member of ACM. Read more of her inspiring life and career, and how an ACM-W Research Computer Science Conference Scholarship helped her on her path here.

ACM Scholarships for Women Computing Students to Attend Research Conferences

With Research Computer Science Conference Scholarships, ACM-W provides support for women undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and related programs to attend research computer science conferences around the world. This exposure to computing research can inspire a student to continue onto the next level of their academic or professional career. 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. Learn more about ACM-W scholarships and how to apply here.

Join ACM-W's Membership Email List

Did you know that ACM-W offers a general email distribution list for its members? This ACM-W public list is a communication channel for disseminating general information about ACM-W, bulletins, and upcoming events, which can be joined here. Also read the ACM-W Connections newsletter for updates on ACM-W programs, local celebrations, scholarships and awards, chapters, and more.

PUBLISHING NEWS

Call for Proposals From the ACM Community: AI for Science

ACM is seeking ideas for a wide-ranging new research journal on AI for Science. Algorithms for data analysis, machine learning, and broader use of data to support scientific insight and engineering optimization have been used for many years. At the same time, the use of AI, in addition to and as a replacement for modelling and simulation, has been particularly intense in the past few years. At this time, expressions of interest are welcome from ACM community members to consider proposing a new journal in this area. If you are interested in creating a proposal for a new publication on the topic of AI for Science, contact ACM.

TOCT Seeks New Editor-in-Chief

ACM Transactions on Computation Theory is seeking a new Editor-in-Chief for a three-year term beginning on February 1, 2023. Nominations are due December 15, 2022. More information is available here.

PACMPL,TOS, and TIIS Name New Editors-in-Chief

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL) has named Michael Hicks as Editor-in-Chief for a three-year term starting November 15, 2022 and ending November 14, 2025. Hicks is a Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services, and is currently on leave from his position as a Professor in the Computer Science Department and UMIACS at the University of Maryland.

ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS) has named Erez Zadok as Editor-in-Chief for a three-year term starting November 15, 2022 and ending November 14, 2025. Zadok is a Professor at the Computer Science Department in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University and directs the Filesystems and Storage Lab in the CS department.

ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TIIS) welcomes Shlomo Berkovsky as its Editor-in-Chief for a term starting November 15, 2022 and ending November 14, 2025. Berkovsky is a Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

New ACM Books

The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents Vol. 2, by Birgit Lugrin, Catherine Pelachaud, and David Traum provides a comprehensive overview of the research fields of Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics. Written by international experts in their respective fields, the book summarizes research in the many important research communities pertinent for SIAs, while discussing current challenges and future directions. The handbook provides easy access to modeling and studying SIAs for researchers and students and aims at further bridging the gap between the research communities involved.

acmqueue: "Split Your Overwhelmed Teams"

acmqueue welcomes the return of columnist Thomas Limoncelli! You may remember Tom from his column, "Everything Sysadmin," which ran from 2015 to 2020. His new column, "Operations and Life," begins with this issue and will focus on DevOps and IT operations from a uniquely personal perspective. In this first installment, Tom writes, "If your team is suffering from low morale and high stress, look at the cognitive load on the team, review its sources, and look for substantive changes that will have the desired impact. The solution might not be splitting the team, but that could be exactly what is needed."

Read the full article.

ACM Open: Amsterdam, Boston, and Electro-Communications Sign New Agreements

ACM is delighted to announce new ACM Open agreements with the University of Amsterdam, Boston College, and the University of Electro-Communications. Through these agreements, researchers and students at participating institutions receive unlimited access to the ACM Digital Library and have the opportunity to publish an unlimited number of research articles Open Access. ACM thanks these institutions for their support of our Open Access publishing.

ACM Open is ACM's transformative open access publishing model for transitioning ACM to become a sustainable open access publisher with the goal of making research publications in the ACM Digital Library fully open access upon publication. A full list of institutions that have signed on to the ACM Open program can be found here.

ACM Blog: How to Secure Elections and Why We Should Adopt Risk-Limiting Audits

Missed our Reddit AMA on election security? Here's a recap of the lively discussions Rice Scholar and TechBrief co-author Dan Wallach had with Reddit users. Check it out and share it with anyone who might be interested in the topic!.

ACM CAREER & JOB CENTER

ACM Career & Job Center Connects You With Career Opportunities

Connecting with the right employers in computing can be a daunting task. Thankfully, the world's leading companies, colleges and universities come to the ACM Career & Job Center to find the best candidates. By creating an account on the ACM Career and Job Center, you'll gain access to a wide range of tools to help you find the perfect job:

Finding a Job - Use the job search tools to find a job that matches your search criteria.
Create and Manage Email Alerts - Stay on top of the latest job openings. Receive an email when new jobs match your search criteria.
Create/Post Resumes - Get noticed by employers. Create or upload a resume with our easy-to-use tools so employer can get in touch with you.
View Saved Jobs - Save jobs that interest you, add notes, share with friends, and track your applications to keep on top of your job search.

For any assistance with the ACM Career and Job Center, please contact ACM's Advertising Sales Manager, Ilia Rodriguez.