ACM MemberNet - August 31, 2023

August 31, 2023

Welcome to the August 2023 edition of 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].

22 A.M. Turing Award and ACM Prize Recipients To Participate in 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum, September 24–29

The 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum will offer young researchers and other participants the opportunity to connect with scientific pioneers and learn how the laureates made it to the top of their fields as some of the brightest minds in mathematics and computer science come together for an unrestrained, interdisciplinary exchange. This compelling networking event combines scientific, social and outreach activities in a unique atmosphere, sustained by comprehensive exchange and scientific inspiration. Notable participants this year include 14 ACM Award recipients including ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Bob Metcalfe, Jack Dongarra, Vinton Cerf, and Martin Hellman, as well as ACM Prize in Computing recipients Yael Tauman Kalai, Alexei Efros , and Shwetak N. Patel, among many others.

While the 10th HLF is being held at its traditional home in Heidelberg, Germany, sessions will also be livestreamed on the HLF website.

ACM Boasts Strong Impact Factor Performance

The journals of ACM once again had an impressive showing in the latest Journal Citation Reports release from Clarivate, with notable performances across the entire portfolio and fifteen journals receiving their first impact factors—including four titles from the innovative Proceedings of the ACM (PACM) program. ACM's flagship magazine Communications of the ACM (CACM) continued its dominance by receiving an all-time high impact factor of 22.7, placing it first in all three of its categories, and ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) which continued to ascend with an impact factor of 16.6, placing it third in the Computer Science, Theory & Methods category.

Read the ACM news release.

AWARDS

Call for Nominations for ACM Awards

Each year, ACM recognizes technical and professional achievements within the computing and information technology community through its celebrated Awards Program. ACM welcomes nominations for candidates whose work exemplifies the best and most influential contributions to our community, and society at large.

ACM seeks your help in expanding and diversifying the nomination pool for our ACM 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.

Please take a moment to consider those people in your community who may be suitable for nomination. Refer to the award nominations page for links to individual award pages, where you will find nomination requirements, deadlines, and Award Subcommittee Members. Keep in mind ACM's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion 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 for most awards are due December 15, 2023.

MEMBER RECOGNITION

A.M. Turing Award Recipient Tony Hoare Receives Royal Society Royal Medal

Congratulations to 1980 A.M. Turing Award recipient Tony Hoare for receiving one of the Royal Society’s highest awards, the Royal Medal, for groundbreaking contributions that have revolutionized the computer programming field, in particular the development of "Hoare logic" that has paved the way for provably correct code, providing a robust framework for ensuring software reliability.

Learn more about the award here.

Call for ACM Fellow/Senior/Distinguished Member Nominations

Fellow is ACM's most prestigious member grade recognizing the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. The deadline for nominations is September 7.

The Distinguished Member advanced grade of membership recognizes those ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience and 5 years of Professional Membership in the last 10 years who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field. Nominations are accepted on an annual basis. The deadline for nominations is August 1.

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 September 3.

SIG NEWS

SIGGRAPH Election Results

The SIGGRAPH election results have been announced:

Director A: Alla Sheffer, University of British Columbia
Director B: Elizabeth Baron, Immersionary Enterprises, LLC
Director C: Courtney Starrett, Texas A&M University

The new Directors will serve their terms from September 1, 2023 to August 31, 2026.

SIGGRAPH 2023 Conference Highlights

Celebrating its 50th year as the premier conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques, the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques provided a platform for innovators to share their exceptional contributions in production and animation, research and education, arts and design, gaming, computer graphics, digital art, animation, visual effects, machine learning, artificial intelligence, immersive and mixed realities, scientific visualization, and more. An international audience of more than 14,275 attendees from 78 countries attended the conference both in person and virtually.

SIG AWARDS

SIGPLAN 2023 Awards Announced

The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) has announced its award recipients for 2023: Kathryn S. McKinley (Programming Languages Achievement Award); Talia Ringer (Distinguished Service Award); Kathi Fisler and Shriram Krishnamurthi (Distinguished Educator Award); OCaml (Programming Languages Software Award); Nate Foster (Robin Milner Young Researcher Award); Sam Westrick (John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award); Thomas Dinsdale-Young, Lars Birkedal, Philippa Gardner, Matthew Parkinson, and Hongseok Yang (Most Influential POPL Paper Award); Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Connelly Barnes, Andrew Adams, Sylvain Paris, Frédo Durand, and Saman Amarasinghe (Most Influential PLDI Paper Award).

STOC Test of Time Awards Announced

The 2023 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) Test of Time Award recognizes papers published in the Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. This is the third year of this annual award. There are three awards, targeting the STOC conferences 10, 20, and 30 years prior to the year in which the award is given. The subjects of this year's selected papers include introducing fundamental techniques for producing integral solutions, quantum mechanics in theoretical computer science, adding the powerful new technique of sieving to lattice algorithms, and more.

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

SIGCOMM 2023, September 10–14

The flagship annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication focuses on the applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication. Planned topics include “Underwater 3D Positioning on Smart Devices,” “Towards Practical and Scalable Molecular Networks,” “Host Congestion Control,” “Direct Telemetry Access,” and more. The keynote speaker will be ACM Fellow and ACM Prize in Computing recipient Dina Katabi (MIT). The event will be held in New York City, New York, USA

Tapia 2023, September 13–15

The ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing features panels, workshops, poster sessions, networking opportunities and a career fair. Tapia will bring together undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers, and professionals in computing from all backgrounds and ethnicities. Topics include "Challenges and Myths in Recruiting/Obtaining Employment at DOE National Laboratories," "Hybrid Social Interactions for Online Education," and more. Plenary speakers will be Armando Solar-Lezama (MIT) and Tara Astigarraga (IBM). The event will be held in Dallas, Texas, USA.

ESWEEK 2023, September 17–22

Embedded Systems Week is the premier event covering all aspects of hardware and software design for intelligent and connected computing systems, bringing together three leading conferences (CASES, CODES+ISSS, EMSOFT), and two symposia (MEMOCODE, NOCS). Subjects covered will include data flow, accelerator design, optical computing, diversity, equity, and inclusion in embedded systems research, and more. Keynote speakers are Sarita Adve (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Heike Riel (IBM), and Lothar Thiele (ETH Zürich). The event will be held Hamburg, Germany.

RecSys 2023, September 18–22

The ACM Conference on Recommender Systems is the premier international forum for the presentation of new research results, systems, and techniques in the broad field of recommender systems. Workshops and tutorials will include "User Behavior Modeling with Deep Learning for Recommendation: Recent Advances," "Recommenders in the Wild/Practical Evaluation Methods," "Trustworthy Recommender Systems," and more. Keynote speakers will Jaime Teevan (Microsoft), Tat-Seng Chua (National University of Singapore), and Rajeev Rastogi (Amazon). This year's conference will be held in Singapore.

PUBLIC POLICY

USTPC Leverages Recent Statement/Principles on Generative AI

In response to a U.S. Food & Drug Administration call for public comments titled "Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Development of Drug and Biological Products," USTPC submitted its latest work on AI to the agency. It also offered further technical assistance upon the agency's request.

That document, Joint Principles for the Development, Deployment, and Use of Generative AI Technologies, also anchored a Zoom briefing for senior staff to US Senator Todd Young (R-IN) by USTPC Chair Larry Medsker, Past Chair Jim Hendler, AI Subcommittee Co-Chair Jeanna Matthews, Generative AI Working Group Chair Ravi Jain, and ACM Fellow Yolanda Gil.

The briefing, patterned after a similar session conducted for staff to Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer in June, highlighted key issues for Congress to consider in devising "guardrails" for the development and deployment of generative AI and other autonomous systems. Senators Schumer and Young, together with Senators Mike Rounds (R-SD) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM), are collaborating on Schumer's "Safe Innovation" AI legislation initiative.

There are likely to be more such USTPC briefings to come! Are you expert in AI, machine learning, autonomous systems? Want to help inform Congress about them at this key moment in their evolution? Please email ACM's Policy Office at [email protected] to find out how.

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

ACM Congratulates Our Fourth Quarter Top Ambassadors

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 fourth quarter of the 2022-2023 program year:

April: Michelle Banawan
May: Zain Aqeel
June: Biswaranjan Senapati

Featured Member Benefit: Freshbooks

FreshBooks is an online accounting and invoicing platform that saves you time, automates your admin, and keeps your books organized and your business looking professional. FreshBooks believes financial recordkeeping should be easy and fast, but still detailed enough to satisfy your accountant. Through our partnership with FreshBooks, ACM members can get up to 90% off for their first four months.

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 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 Communication 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

ACM Skills Bundle Add-On

ACM has created a new Skills Bundle add-on providing unlimited access to ACM's collection of thousands of online books, courses, and training videos from O'Reilly, Skillsoft Percipio, and Pluralsight on the latest technologies and most in-demand job skills, and popular vendor certifications. The new Skills Bundle add-on is available to paid Professional Members only, with course levels spanning Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced, and including learning paths and exam preparation tracks for some of today's hottest certifications such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Tableau, and more. To add the Skills Bundle to your existing Professional Membership, visit the ACM subscription page or contact Member Services.

ACM ByteCast Interviews Robert Metcalfe

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 this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes 2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award Laureate Robert Metcalfe, Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and Research Affiliate in Computational Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Metcalfe received his Turing Award for the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet, the foundational technology of the Internet, which supports more than 5 billion users and enables much of modern life. In a wide-ranging interview, Metcalfe reflects on his “Ethernet paper” with David Boggs from 1976, and how the interoperability and backward compatibility baked into the Ethernet allows the technology to hold up in the age of Netflix and Zoom, how far down “the stack” one needs to go to fully appreciate and understand a piece of technology, and much more

ACM ByteCast Interviews Mor Peleg

In this episode of ACM ByteCast—part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast—hosts Sabrina Hsueh and Adela Grando welcome Mor Peleg, Professor of Information Systems at the University of Haifa and Founding Director and Head of its Data Science Research Center. Peleg shares how she arrived at the intersection of information systems and medicine after working in IT and completing her postdoctoral research at Stanford, and talks about her recent project, MobiGuide, which aims to narrow the gap between clinical guidance and patient needs by providing 24/7 decision support to patients and providers. She also shares advice for people (especially women) looking to work in interdisciplinary fields and emphasizes the importance of health equity and how AI can be employed in the service of detecting unfairness.

ACM ByteCast Interviews Anima Anandkumar

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Anima Anandkumar, a Bren Professor of Computing at California Institute of Technology (the youngest named Chair Professor at Caltech) and the Senior Director of AI Research at NVIDIA, where she leads a group developing the next generation of AI algorithms. Anandkumar talks about growing up in a house where computer science was a way of life and family members who served as strong role models, shares her path in education and research at the highly selective IIT-Madras, emphasizes the importance of a strong background in math in her computing work, reveals some of the breakthrough moments in her career, and discusses topic modeling and reinforcement learning and the promise and challenges brought about by the age of generative AI.

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

ACM TechTalk: Creating Local-First Collaboration Software with Automerge

Register to view the TechTalk, “Creating Local-First Collaboration Software with Automerge,” on September 27, 2023 at 12:00 pm ET (4 pm UTC) with Martin Kleppmann, a Research Fellow at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and moderator Peter van Hardenberg, Research Director, Ink & Switch. Many of us use collaboration software such as Google Docs, Overleaf, Figma, or Trello. However, implementing real-time collaboration features in your own apps is technically challenging, and the resulting software often behaves poorly when the user’s internet connection is unstable, and service outages leave users locked out of their files. Local-first software is an effort to make collaboration software less dependent on cloud services, and Automerge is an open-source library for realizing local-first software. Automerge uses Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) to allow several users to concurrently update a file, and it automatically merges those updates into a consistent result. This talk will introduce our recent research on CRDTs, and provide an update on the latest developments in Automerge.

View on Demand - ACM TechTalk: Ethical and Responsible Large Language Models

Register to view the TechTalk, "Ethical and Responsible Large Language Models: Challenges and Best Practices" with Miquel Noguer i Alonso (Artificial Intelligence Finance Institute), Nicole Königstein (Quantmate), and moderator Angelica Lo Duca (IIT-CNR), who explore the challenges and best practices for developing ethical and responsible Large Language Models (LLMs), the importance of transparency and explainability, showcasing methods such as attention visualization and model distillation that provide critical insights into model behavior, and address the control of generated content through techniques including reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), token penalization, external moderation systems, and prompt engineering. Finally, they will tackle the issue of bias mitigation, emphasizing the need for transparency in the pre-training data used for these billion-parameter models, diverse and representative data, as well as pre-, in-, and post-processing techniques to ensure fairness in LLMs.

View on Demand: ACM TechTalk - Reskilling to Build Diverse Tech Teams

Register to view the TechTalk, "Reskilling to Build Diverse Tech Teams" on demand, in which the subject of skills shortages in the tech industry is explored. Re-skilling existing employees at the speed of business is paramount for companies to stay competitive, but that's not enough, we also need to bring new tech-skilled employees into the workforce. The panel for this session—moderator Sue Black (Durham University), Elizabeth Hawthorne (Rider University), Marlene Mhangami (Voltron Data), Tan Moorthy (Infosys, Retired), and Brad Voeller (New Apprenticeship)—have created, run, and taken part in successful programs specifically focused on retraining people into technology careers and creating pathways into tech from other areas with great success. They discuss how to reskill, build diverse teams, and solve industry skills shortages from our multiple experiences to meet the challenge of rapidly changing technologies.

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

EDUCATION

ACM Ethics in Computing Education: Facial Recognition

Hosted by EngageCSEdu, The Ethics & Computing Repository is designed to aid studying, or teaching courses, involving ethical issues related to a broad range of computing topics. It is a collection of articles, mainly from popular media and many of them recent. Each month MemberNet will feature a different subject in ethics and computing, offering a variety of articles, reports, and other interesting and informative items for readers to explore.

This month, the focus is "Facial Recognition." Titles under this category include "Faces are the Next Target for Fraudsters," "US Lawmakers Aim to Curtail Face Recognition," and more.

STUDENT NEWS

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 SIGGRAPH 2023. The next conferences accepting submissions are:

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: Ilke Demir

Ilke Demir's research focuses on generative models for digitizing the real world, deep fake detection and generation techniques, analysis and synthesis approaches in geospatial machine learning, and computational geometry for synthesis and fabrication. Currently, she is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Intel Corporation. At the intersection of art and science, Demir contributed to several animated features and VR/AR short films for Pixar Animation Studios and Intel Studios, respectively. She established the research foundations of the world's largest volumetric capture studio at Intel, bridging the gap between the creative process and AI approaches. Her lectures include “Embattling for a Deep Fake Dystopia,” “The Future of Filmmaking: AI for Volumetric Capture and Reconstruction,” and more. She is available to speak through the ACM Distinguished Speaker Program.

For more information about Demir, please visit her DSP speaker information page.

MEETUPS

ACM Local Meetups

ACM Local Meetups connect smart technical people at local city events. They are informal groups that meet regularly to discuss a diverse array of computing topics. The following local ACM Meetups have been scheduled:

Youngstown: NEOACM REMOTE General Assembly Meeting, September 3
This is a monthly meeting where will be reports from the treasurer, secretary, and committee heads. We will have article discussions and lightning talks.
Kansas City: ACM - Kansas City Meeting, September 14
Monthly meeting where a specific topic is presented, and an informal general discussion occurs after.
Youngstown: NEOACM's Robotics Programming Festival '23, September 17
NeoACM and the George Mason University Libraries are sponsoring a “Robot Programming Festival” in Fall on September 17, 2023. This festival will be a REMOTE ALL DAY event focusing on robot programming presentations
Orange County: Natural Language Analysis—How to Understand Tons of Text in Minutes, September 20
Join guest speaker William Wood Harter (Luminoso) to learn about natural language analysis and how to process text in new and innovative ways

ACM Local Meetups are active in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Mumbai, New York City, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Rio de Janeiro, Sacramento, San Francisco, Surabaya, Washington DC, and Youngstown. If you are interested in organizing a Meetup in your locale, please contact Andrew Conklin.

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 June 16 through August 15, 2023:

ACM Student Chapters:

B P Poddar Institute of Management & Technology ACM Student Chapter, Kolkata, India
Baylor University ACM-W Student Chapter, Waco, TX, USA
KLE Tech Univ Dr. MSSCET ACM Student Chapter, Belagavi, India
Madanapalle ITS ACM Student Chapter, Madanapalle, India
Missouri State University ACM Student Chapter, Springfield, MO, USA
MIT Moradabad ACM Student Chapter, Moradabad, India
Oral Roberts University ACM-W Student Chapter, Tulsa, OK, USA
UCEK ACM Student Chapter, Kakinada, India
UM6P ACM Student Chapter, Benguerir, Morocco
University of Science and Technology Beijing ACM Student Chapter, Beijing, China

ACM Professional Chapters:

Canberra ACM SIGCHI Chapter, Canberra, Australia
Innovative Digital Transformation ACM Chapter, Amman, Jordan
Meerut ACM Chapter, Meerut, India
SIGHPC Computing Continuum ACM Chapter, Porto Alegre, Brazil

Submitting ACM Annual Report

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 2023 (July 1, 2022–June 30, 2023) and is due by August 31, 2023. To complete the report online, you must log in with your unique chapter web account at https://www.acm.org/chapters/chapter-administrative-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://www.acm.org/chapters/web-account-links.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact [email protected].

ACM-W NEWS

View on Demand - Celebrating Technology Leaders: Inspiring Women of DevOps

DevOps engineering is a relatively new career focused on building bridges between the developmental and operational sides of software development. But what does it take to become a DevOps engineer? What kind of work environment do they operate in? And is it a promising career for women in tech? View the most recent episode of "ACM-W Celebrating Technology Leaders," with host Bushra Anjum, in which you will hear from women with successful DevOps careers and learn from their experiences working in DevOps and as women in the field.

View the episode here.

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

ACM-W Europe 10-year Anniversary: Tiziana Catarci

This year marks the 10th womENcourage celebration, and ACM-W Europe is excited to share the stories of this event had so far while looking forward to bigger, greater, and more exciting celebrations to come. And ACM-W Europe is acknowledging this milestone with a series of blogs from past chairs who have successfully organized this event each year. This month's blog interview is with Tiziana Catarci, who was Co-Chair of womENcourage 2019. Learn more about Catarci, her work with womENcourage, and her efforts to increase diversity to drive societal change here.

Breaking Down Barriers to Open-Source Contributions

Have you ever felt a touch of nervousness when it comes to contributing to an open-source project? You are far from alone. Even though a community may be incredibly friendly and encouraging, taking those first steps with your initial pull requests can be quite intimidating. Today, Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC) Alumni and ACM-W Newsletter Editor Taneea S Agrawaal shares her first-hand experience and provides encouraging bits of inspiration for anyone needing to put their doubts aside in dealing with open source.

Read her story 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.

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 $1,200 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.

DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION

Apply to Join LEVEL UP Regional Workshops

Computing education continues to face challenges around inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessible learning, and we believe change is possible through a coordinated effort among engaged computing leaders and faculty. The goal of the LEVEL UP project—a combined initiative of ACM, CRA and IEEE-CS—is to build consensus around a united vision of inclusive undergraduate computing education. Through collaboration with a respected advisory board of computing educators and professionals from across the country, LEVEL UP will chart a pathway that undergraduate computing programs can implement to offer inclusive computing courses and opportunities where all students feel welcome and thrive.

Learn more about the workshops and apply here.

PUBLISHING NEWS

Ceasing Print Editions for ACM Journals and Transactions

ACM has made the decision to cease print publication for ACM’s journals and transactions as of January 2024. The magazines Communications of the ACM, ACM InRoads, interactions, and XRDS: Crossroads will continue in print. There were several motivations for this change: ACM wants to be as environmentally friendly as possible; print journals lack the new features and functionality of the electronic versions in the ACM Digital Library; and print subscriptions, which have been declining for years, have now reached a level where the decision to sunset print made perfect sense. Ultimately, this will be to the benefit of the community, enabling ACM to focus efforts on enhancing the electronic versions of the publications where they can have the greatest impact.

acmqueue: Introducing "Bridging the Moat"

acmqueue is pleased to announce the launch of a new column, "Bridging the Moat," by Phil Vachon, who leads the information security program in Bloomberg’s CTO’s Office. In his first offering, 'Security Mismatch,' Vachon lays out a narrative that shows how security must be a business enabler, not a hinderer. Information security teams that say "no" need to change. Hiding behind a moat makes repelling attacks easy, but bridges allow you to replenish supplies and foster relationships with customers. Remember, a security team's role is to empower their business to move forward with confidence, not to hinder progress.

Read the full article.

PACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies Welcomes Co-Editors-in-Chief

PACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT) welcomes Co-Editors-in-Chief Lena Mamykina (Assistant Professor, Columbia University) and Thomas Ploetz (Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology). Their terms are from January 1, 2024 to December 31, 2026.

ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation Welcomes Co-Editors-in-Chief

ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC) welcomes new Co-Editors-in-Chief Paul Goldberg (Professor of Computer Science, University of Oxford) and Utku Ünver (Professor of Economics, Boston College). Their terms are from September 15, 2023 to September 14, 2026.

ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems Seeking New Editor-in-Chief

ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS) is seeking a new Editor-in-Chief. This is a voluntary position. Nominations should include a vita along with a brief statement of why the nominee should be considered. Nominations are due September 15, 2023, although nominations will continue to be accepted until the position is filled.

For more information, visit the call page.

ACM Open: Lyrasis, SCELC

ACM is pleased to announce a new ACM Open agreement with Lyrasis. Affiliated researchers from more than 40 institutions across the United States will now have the opportunity to publish an unlimited number of research articles Open Access in the ACM Digital Library. ACM also announces a new ACM Open agreement with the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC). This new agreement facilitates Open Access publishing at 14 institutions, bringing the total number of participants in the ACM Open program to more than 750 worldwide!

ACM thanks the participating institutions for their support of ACM’s transition to a fully Open Access publisher, and ACM would also like to thank Lyrasis and SCELC for their efforts and advocacy on behalf of their member institutions during the consultation period.

ACM Open is ACM's transformative Open Access publishing model for transitioning ACM to 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. Learn more about ACM’s timeline for transitioning the Digital Library to Open Access here.

Follow ACM Digital Library on LinkedIn

ACM DL has come to LinkedIn! Visit today and follow the page for the latest award-winning papers and top-notch journal articles covering a wide range of topics in the field of computing.

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 employers 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.

ACM MemberNet - August 31, 2023