ACM MemberNet - January 26, 2023

Welcome to the January 2023 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.

Is there a person, event, or issue you'd like to see covered? Please email [email protected].

January 26, 2023

ACM Names 2022 Fellows

ACM has named 57 of its members ACM Fellows for wide-ranging and fundamental contributions in disciplines including cybersecurity, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and recommender systems among many other areas. The accomplishments of the 2022 ACM Fellows make possible the computing technologies we use every day. The ACM Fellows program recognizes 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.

“Computing’s most important advances are often the result of a collection of many individual contributions, which build upon and complement each other,” explained ACM President Yannis Ioannidis. “But each individual contribution is an essential link in the chain. The ACM Fellows program is a way to recognize the women and men whose hard work and creativity happens inconspicuously but drives our field. In selecting a new class of ACM Fellows each year, we also hope that learning about these leaders might inspire our wider membership with insights for their own work.”

In keeping with ACM’s global reach, the 2022 Fellows represent universities, corporations, and research centers in Canada, Chile, China, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.

Additional information about the 2022 ACM Fellows, as well as previously named ACM Fellows, is available through the ACM Fellows site.

Read the ACM news release.

Barbara Liskov Awarded the Franklin Medal

2008 A.M. Turing Award recipient Barbara Liskov has been awarded the 2023 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science for seminal contributions to computer programming languages and methodology, enabling the implementation of reliable, reusable programs. She received the A.M. Turing Award for contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.

AWARDS

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.

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 March 3, 2023.

SIG NEWS

SIG Elections

In accordance with ACM Bylaw 6, the following SIGs will hold elections in 2023: SIGAPP, SIGARCH, SIGCAS, SIGDOC, SIGENERGY, SIGEVO, SIGMETRICS, SIGMICRO, SIGOPS, SIGSPATIAL, and SIGWEB.

ACM's Policy and Procedure on SIG Elections requires that those SIGs holding elections notify their membership of candidates for elected offices. To see the slate of candidates, please visit the 2023 ACM SIG Elections site.

In accordance with the ACM SIG Bylaws, additional candidates may be placed on the ballot by petition. All candidates must be ACM Professional Members, as well as members of the SIG. Anyone interested in petitioning must inform ACM Headquarters, Pat Ryan and the Secretary of the SIG of their intent to petition by 15 March, 2023. Petitions must be submitted to ACM Headquarters for verification by 31 March, 2023.

*ACM SIGGRAPH's election will commence on 15 June 2023.

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

FPGA 2023, February 12–14

The ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays is a premier conference for presentation of advances in FPGA technology. Workshops and tutorials include “FPGA Architecture for Deep Learning,” “Enabling Networking for Distributed Applications on FPGA Clusters,” “Workshop on Security for Custom Computing Machines,” “Leveraging MLIR to Design for AI Engines,” and more. Keynote speakers are Saman Amarasinghe (MIT) and Jaideep Dastidar (AMD). The 31st edition of FPGA will be held in Monterey, California, USA.

HotMobile 2023, February 22-23

The 24th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications continues the series of highly selective, interactive workshops focused on mobile applications, systems, and environments, as well as their underlying state-of-the-art technologies. HotMobile's small workshop format makes it ideal for processing and discussing new directions or controversial approaches. HotMobile seeks proposals for posters and live demonstrations describing novel work on mobile systems, applications, and services. This year's conference will be held in Orange County, California, USA.

TEI 2023, February 26–March 1

The Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interactions addresses issues of human-computer interaction, novel tools and technologies, interactive art, and user experience. Papers this year include "Grounding Graph Theory in Embodied Concreteness with Virtual Reality," "Wisp: Drones as Companions for Breathing," "Bamboo Agents: Release the Potential of Digital Craft by Decoding and Recoding Process," and more. Keynote speakers will be Yvon Bonenfant (University College Cork) and Astrid Kappers (Eindhoven University of Technology). This event will be held in Warsaw, Poland.

WSDM 2023, February 27–March 3

The ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining is one of the premier conferences on web-inspired research involving search and data mining. Workshops include "Collaboration of Humans and Learning Algorithms for Data Labeling," "Machine Learning on Graphs," and more. WSDM is a highly selective conference that includes invited talks, as well as refereed full papers. Keynote speakers are Ya-Qin Zhang (Tsinghua University), Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam), and Rosie Jones (Spotify). The event will be held in Singapore.

PUBLIC POLICY

TechBrief: "Safer Algorithmic Systems"

The Technology Policy Council’s sixth and latest ACM TechBrief has just been published in the ACM Digital Library. "Safer Algorithmic Systems," by prolific ACM author and AI expert Ben Shneiderman, observes at the outset that "while incredibly useful and generally benign, when deployed in complex systems algorithms can cause a variety of profound harms to individuals and to society, threatening opportunity, liberty, and even life itself. The Brief goes on to identify three principal policy implications of those facts:

Enabling safer algorithmic systems must be a high research and policy priority of governments and all stakeholders
Organizational safety cultures must be broadly embraced and routinely woven into algorithmic system development and operation
Safer algorithmic systems will require multiple forms of sustained internal and independent oversight

Its resulting recommendations are:

To promote safer algorithmic systems, research is needed on both human-centered and technical software development methods, improved testing, audit trails, and monitoring mechanisms, as well as training and governance
Building organizational safety cultures requires management leadership, focus in hiring and training, adoption of safety-related practices, and continuous attention
Internal and independent human-centered oversight mechanisms, both within government and organizations, are necessary to promote safer algorithmic systems

ACM TechBriefs are published quarterly by the Technology Policy Council. Collectively, the first five Briefs have been downloaded roughly 20,000 times in more than 135 nations and territories globally since the first issue on Computing and Climate Change was published in late 2021. All issues are archived online.

SUBSCRIBE NOW! Automatically receiving TechBriefs quarterly as they’re released is easy. Simply send an email with a single line in the body of the message that reads: subscribe ACM-tpc-tech-briefs followed by your first and last names. An automated reply will ask you to confirm your subscription to activate it.

Near-Final Cyber Resilience Act Critiqued by Europe TPC for European Commission

The European Commission is close to finalizing legislation known in brief as the Cyber Resilience Act, which the Commission describes as a "proposal for a regulation on cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements [that]...bolsters cybersecurity rules to ensure more secure hardware and software products." ACM’s Europe Technology Policy Committee first commented on the proposed regulations on 25, May 2022. In the wake of those and many other comments received, the Commission then put forward the proposed Cyber Resilience Act for negotiation with the European Parliament and European Council. These negotiations are ongoing.

A small working group of the Europe TPC, led by Committee Chair Chris Hankin analyzed the 87-page proposed Regulation and commented on it, select section-by-section, in significant detail. Those comments, approved for submission to the European Commission by the Committee late this month, included recommendations (among other more technical points) that the Commission:

Expand the proposed regulation’s scope to encompass commercial software that relies on open-source software development kits or application programming interfaces that might be adversely affected by vulnerabilities in the underlying open-source SDK or API
Harmonize the proposed regulation’s requirements for how long spare parts must be available to the public with other germane legislation’s provisions
Amend the penalty provisions of the proposed Act to better track market realities and foreseeable changes

The European Commission has finalized its own work on the proposed regulation, which now must be approved by both the European Parliament and Council in what are known as "trilogue" negotiations with the Commission. The timeline for adoption of a final regulation is currently uncertain.

USTPC Scrutinizes, Comments on NIST Report on De-Identification of Government Data Sets

ACM’s US Technology Policy Committee commented this month on the third and latest version of a Special Report by the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on De-Identifying Government Data Sets. Initially published for comment in 2016, the most recent November 22, 2022 Report explains that de-identification is "a process that is applied to a dataset with the goal of preventing or limiting informational risks to individuals, protected groups, and establishments while still allowing for meaningful statistical analysis. Government agencies can use de-identifcation to reduce the privacy risk associated with collecting, processing, archiving, distributing, or publishing government data."

The Report, NIST notes, is intended to provide "specific guidance to government agencies that wish to use de-identifcation." To that end, USTPC submitted more than two-dozen line-level suggestions for clarifying the report. More broadly, the Committee also recommended that the report: 1) be “supplemented to explicitly provide greater clarity with respect to how the document might best be used by its multiple likely audiences”; and 2) “would benefit from the precise and consistent use of risk-related terminology."

Finally, USTPC noted in its submittal that USTPC Digital Governance Subcommittee Chair Simson Garfinkel was the report’s lead author for NIST. He thus did not participate in preparation of the comments filed.

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.

ACM is pleased to announce the following top recruiters in the Ambassadors for ACM member recruitment program for the second quarter of the 2022-2023 program year:

October: Divya B
November: Arun Korath
December: Shashikant Singh

Featured Member Benefit: Discounts and Special Offers

ACM's Discounts and Special Offers Program is our way of saying "Thanks!" to our members by providing you with discounts on the goods and services you need, want and use. Save on insurance, software/hardware, careers and conferences, magazines, books and journals, travel, financial products, and general consumer products.

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. Later this year, 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 Pluralsight page, click on Pluralsight in the top right corner, and log in with your member credentials.

ACM ByteCast Interviews Neil Trevett

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 of ACM ByteCast, host Rashmi Mohan interviews guest Neil Trevett. Trevett is a pioneer in the world of computer graphics, Vice President of Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA, and President of the Khronos Group, a nonprofit consortium publishing open standards in a variety of computer graphics related areas. Here, Trevett discusses the evolution of computer graphics, how 3D in e-commerce is changing the landscape, looking towards the exciting future in technology, and much more.

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

Watch ACM TechTalk With Maurício Aniche

Register now for the TechTalk, "Effective Developer Testing" with Maurício Aniche, Assistant Professor of Software Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, taking place February 15, 2023, 11:00 am EST (4 pm UTC). We all know by now how to write automated tests. But can we get better at it? In this talk, Aniche will dive into what it takes to take developer testing to a whole new level based on lessons learned while trying to write good tests as a developer, as well as when trying to educate 500 TU Delft computer scientists on the art of software testing every year. This TechTalk will cover how to write tests in a more systematic way so that we go beyond the happy path; how can we use code coverage to improve the testing process, and what research says about it; unit vs integration vs E2E tests, and mocking: the good, the bad and the ugly; and three simple rules to achieve design for testability, and how much TDD is needed.

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

EDUCATION

Online Panel: "Is OER Right for Your Computing Classroom?"

ACM2Y, a group for those interested in computing education in two-year programs, is hosting an online panel, "Is OER (Open Educational Resources) Right for Your Computing Classroom?" The panel will take place on January 27, 2023, at 3 pm EST (8 pm UTC). Panelists are Jeffrey Elkner (Arlington Public Schools), Teri Lane (Mountain Empire Community College), and Lisa Payne (Brightpoint Community College). To take part, enter here.

Contribute Instructional Materials to EngageCSEdu

Did you know that the ACM Education Board has a special project that allows you to share outstanding instructional materials from your classes? EngageCSEdu publishes high-quality, engaging, classroom-tested Open Educational Resources (OER’s) for computer science education. A key value of EngageCSEdu is to broaden participation in computing. To this end, OER’s accepted for publication must use at least one research-based engagement mechanism aimed at increasing diversity and inclusion, e.g., culturally responsive pedagogy or an engagement practice from the NCWIT engagement framework. Materials should be free of stereotypes and references that might evoke stereotype threat. General submission information can be found here.

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.

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 SPLASH ‘22. The next conferences accepting submissions are:

SIGMETRICS 2023, June 19-23, 2023, deadline March 1, 2023
PLDI 2023, June 19–21, 2023, deadline March 23, 2023
SIGDOC 2023, October 26–28, 2023, deadline May 7, 2023
ESEC/FSE 2023, November 11–24, 2023, deadline June 29, 2023
SC 2023, November 12–17, 2023, deadline August 5, 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: Francesco Flammini

Francesco Flammini is a Full Professor of Computer Science with a focus on Cyber-Physical Systems at Mälardalen University (Sweden) and the Technical Manager of the RAILS EU-funded research project about Artificial Intelligence in the railway domain. He has been a Senior Lecturer and the chair of the Cyber-Physical Systems group at Linnaeus University (Sweden). He has worked for 15 years in private and public companies, including Ansaldo STS (now Hitachi Rail) and IPZS (Italian State Mint and Polygraphic Institute), on large international projects addressing intelligent transportation systems, critical infrastructure protection and cybersecurity, as a technical leader and unit head. His most current research interests are about safe autonomous systems and trustworthy AI. He is also a member of the ERCIM Working Group on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS). He is available to speak through the ACM Distinguished Speaker Program.

For more information about Flammini, 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 December 14, 2022 through January 12, 2023:

ACM Student Chapters:

Ankara University ACM Student Chapter, Ankara, Turkey
Dartmouth College ACM Student Chapter, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA
JNNCE ACM Student Chapter, Shivamogga, India
MUJ ACM SIGAI Student Chapter, Jaipur, India
SVCET ACM Student Chapter, Chittoor, India
University of Central Florida ACM SIGGRAPH Student Chapter, Orlando, Florida, USA
USC ACM SIGGRAPH Student Chapter, Los Angeles, California, USA
VRS ACM SIGAI Student Chapter, Vijayawada, India

ACM-W NEWS

Empowered by Support: Communities, Connections and Careers for Women in Tech

Whether you are a student or an experienced engineering leader, a robust network, an opportunity for peer learning, the prospects of mentorship, and a crowd-sourced catalog of career opportunities, are vital for your personal and professional progression. In this episode of "ACM-W Celebrating Technology Leaders," taking place February 15, 3 pm EST (8pm UTC), you will see senior women technologists who have devoted decades of their lives, either as full-time careers or as passionate volunteers, to creating and nurturing empowering communities for technical women. Join the panel—Nidhi Gupta (SheTO), Rose Robinson (Executive Tech Consultant), Kathleen Fisher (OwnTrail), and Farah Ali (Electronic Arts)—with host Bushra Anjum and learn about the various support and learning communities for women in tech that you can join based on your individual goals and career stage, with the hope of inspiring you to create such spaces yourself, where you can empower others and nurture a sense of belonging

Registration will be open next week and announced here.

Previous episodes of "Celebrating Technology Leaders" can be viewed here.

womENcourage: Trondheim, Norway, 20-22 September 2023

The 10th ACM Celebration of Women in Computing: womENcourage 2023 will take place at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, on 20-22 September, 2023. The theme of the conference is "Computing Connecting Everyone." Open to all genders, womENcourage was initiated by ACM-W Europe and aimed at connecting women from diverse technical disciplines and encouraging them to pursue their education and profession in computing. WomENcourage brings together women in the computing profession and related technical fields to exchange knowledge and experience and provide special support for women who are pursuing their academic degrees and starting their careers in computing. Through a program packed with insightful topics and engaging educational and networking activities, womENcourage provides a unique experience of the collective energy, drive, and excellence that professional women share to support each other.

Above and Beyond Scholarship—Julita Inca Chiroque

As a recipient of an ACM-W Scholarship, Julita Inca Chiroque 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. Chiroque has worked as a High-Performance Computing Software Specialist in the nuclear fusion field at UKAEA after graduating with a Masters in High-Performance Computing at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. She has previous experience in High-Performance Computing in the US at ORNL where she worked with supercomputers such as Titan and Summit, and has over 10 years of experience working on worldwide Linux projects such as GNOME and Fedora. She is a worldwide speaker, graphic designer, content creator, press communicator, and photographer. Read more of her inspiring life and career, and how an ACM-W 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

New ACM Books

Effective Theories in Programming Practice by Jayadev Misra explores set theory, logic, discrete mathematics, and fundamental algorithms (along with their correctness and complexity analysis). These will always remain useful for computing professionals and need to be understood by students who want to succeed. This textbook explains a number of those fundamental algorithms to programming students in a concise, yet precise, manner. The book includes the background material needed to understand the explanations and to develop such explanations for other algorithms. The book is self-contained, assuming only a background in high school mathematics and elementary program writing skills. It does not assume familiarity with any specific programming language.

Did you know that members of ACM can have full access to the ACM Books series by purchasing an annual subscription? It's a convenient, economical way for both Professional and Student members to expand their knowledge in a number of fields within the computer sciences. There are currently two Collections encompassing dozens of titles with many more planned for future release.

Professional members of ACM can subscribe to the ACM Books series at $29 per year. Join here.
Student members of ACM can subscribe at $10 per year. Join here.

acmqueue: "Reinventing Backend Subsetting at Google"

Peter Ward, Paul Wankadia, and Kavita Guliani, all from Google, explain how backend subsetting—a technique for reducing the number of connections when connecting services together—is useful for reducing costs and may even be necessary for operating within the system limits. For more than a decade, Google used deterministic subsetting as its default backend subsetting algorithm. This algorithm balances the number of connections per backend task, but has a high level of connection churn. The goal was to design an algorithm with reduced connection churn that could replace deterministic subsetting as the default algorithm. It was ambitious because, as Hyrum's Law states, "All observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody." An understanding of all the behaviors of deterministic subsetting is needed to avoid regressions.

Read the full article.

Interactions Magazine Names New Co-Editors-in-Chief

Interactions has named Elizabeth Churchill and Mikael Wiberg as new Co-Editors-in-Chief for the term of January 2023–January 2026. Churchill, who served as Vice President of ACM from July 2018–June 2020, is Director of User Experience at Google in Mountain View, CA. Wiberg, who served as one of the magazine's three co-editors from 2019–2022, is a professor in the Department of Informatics at Umeå University, Sweden.

TOCHI Welcomes New Co-Editor-in-Chief

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) welcomes new Co-EIC Kasper Hornbaeck, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, for a term starting 20 January, 2023 and ending 31 October, 2024. He is joining the current EIC, Kristina Höök. Up to now, the journal had only had a single EIC.

eLearn Magazine Call for EIC

eLearn Magazine, ACM’s Web-only publication serving the field of online education and training, is seeking applications for an Editor-in-Chief (EiC), or co-Editors-in-Chief. It is an open-access, “blind” peer-reviewed publication at the intersection of eLearning research and practice. Established in 2001, eLearn Magazine is freely available and has built a strong following and reputation for its high-quality editorial content from many of the thought leaders and practitioners in the field. We are searching for a dynamic and reputable individual with an active interest in Education Technology innovation who can help steer the publication forward. This is an entirely voluntary position, but ACM will provide administrative support. Applicants should submit a short resume and a vision statement. The deadline for submissions is February 28, 2023. The editorship will commence on July 1, 2023. More information is available here.

New ACM Journals Open for Submissions

Proceedings of the ACM on Networking (PACMNET) is a journal for research relevant to multiple aspects of the area of computer networking. The journal seeks papers presenting significant and novel research results on emerging computer networks and its applications, especially submissions that present new technologies, novel experimentation, creative use of networking technologies, and new insights made possible using analysis. PACMNET is also looking for papers on network properties such as policy and economics, security and privacy, reliability and availability, performance, energy efficiency, etc.

ACM Journal on Responsible Computing (JRC) will publish high-quality original research at the intersection of computing, ethics, information, law, policy, responsible innovation, and social responsibility from a wide range of convergent, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary perspectives. The journal welcomes papers using any or a combination of computational, conceptual, qualitative, quantitative, and other methods to make contributions to knowledge, methods, practice, and theory, broadly defined.

ACM Journal on Autonomous Transportation Systems (JATS) aims to cover topics in design, analysis, and the control of autonomous transportation systems. The area of autonomous transportation systems is at a critical point where the issues of data, models, computation, and scale are increasingly important. Multiple disciplines are approaching the problems of traffic operations, road safety, sustainability, and efficient road traffic and vehicle management which require communication cooperation. Interdisciplinary research in communications and networking, control systems, machine learning, traffic engineering, transportation systems, and unmanned aerial systems are also of interest.

ACM Games: Research and Practice (GAMES) offers a lighthouse for games research—a central reference point that defines the state of the art on games and playable media across academic research and industry practice. Inclusive in community, discipline, method, and game form, it publishes major reviews, tutorials, and advances on games and playable media that are both practically useful and grounded in robust evidence and argument, alongside case studies, opinions, and dialogues on new developments that will change games. It embraces open science and scholarship and actively champions new and underrepresented voices in games and playable media.

Inspired by the broad agenda of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Communities (JCSS) aims to publish significant and original research from a broad array of computer and information sciences, social sciences, environmental sciences, and engineering fields that support the growth of sustainable societies worldwide, especially including under-represented and marginalized communities. JCSS aims to explicitly promote interdisciplinary research work including new methodologies, systems, techniques, applications, behavioral, qualitative, and quantitative studies that address key societal challenges including sustainability, gender equality, health, education, poverty, accessibility, conservation, climate change, energy, infrastructure, and economic growth, among others. We also welcome research on the ethics of technology, especially from a critical perspective, that explores limitations and concerns with technology-led solutions for sustainable societies.

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.

ACM Open: Heal-LINK, CzechELib, and Several Universities

ACM is thrilled to announce two new ACM Open consortia agreements that begin in 2023. ACM is proud to partner with Heal-LINK in Greece and CzechELib in the Czech Republic. 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 is delighted to welcome the University of Amsterdam, Wroclaw University, Politechnika Krakowska, Politechnika Warszawska (Warsaw University of Technology), Nanyang Technological University, National Chung Cheng University, and BME Omikk Budapest University of Technology and Economics to the ACM Open program.

ACM thanks these institutions and consortia for their support of our Open Access publishing. It is through these agreements that ACM will successfully transition to a fully Open Access publisher before the end of 2025. 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.

Join ACM’s Mastodon Instance

Are you planning to open a Mastodon account? Consider joining ACM's Mastodon instance, now up and running right here! Already there? You can either follow ACM here or move your account to ACM's server following the steps explained here.

For those of you who are hearing the name for the first time, Mastodon is a federated social platform consisting of a network of servers, each governed by different rules and topics. Welcome to the decentralized social platform!

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.