ACM MemberNet - Spring 2024

Avi Wigderson Receives 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award

ACM has named Avi Wigderson as recipient of the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award for foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for his decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science. Wigderson is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has been a leading figure in computational complexity theory, algorithms and optimization, randomness and cryptography, parallel and distributed computation, combinatorics, and graph theory.

Wigderson will deliver his Turing Award Lecture, “Alan Turing: A TCS Role Model,” on Thursday, June 27 at 6 pm PT (Friday June 28 at 1 am UTC) at STOC 2024. Check the ACM website for updates.

Read the news release.

Amanda Randles Receives 2023 ACM Prize in Computing

ACM has named Amanda Randles, Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Duke University, the recipient of the 2023 ACM Prize in Computing for groundbreaking contributions to computational health through innovative algorithms, tools, and high-performance computing methods for diagnosing and treating a variety of human diseases. She is known for developing new computational tools to harness the world’s most powerful supercomputers to create highly precise simulations of biophysical processes and creating accurate 3D simulations of how blood flows through the circulatory system.

Read the news release.

ACM PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

ACM Fellows Inducted Into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Eight ACM Fellows have been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Congratulations to Nancy M. Amato (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Jason Cong (University of California, Los Angeles), Lise Getoor (University of California, Santa Cruz), Juan E. Gilbert (University of Florida), Elchanan Mossel, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Elizabeth Mynatt (Northeastern University Khoury College of Computer Sciences), Alberto Luigi Sangiovanni-Vincentelli (University of California, Berkeley), and Dan Suciu (University of Washington).

AWARDS / MEMBER RECOGNITION

ACM and CSTA Announce 2023-2024 Cutler-Bell Prize

ACM and the Computer Science Teachers Association have announced the 2023-2024 recipients of the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing. The award recognizes computer science talent in high school students and comes with a $10,000 prize, which they will receive at CSTA's annual conference in July. The recipients are Shobhit Agarwal, Reedy High School, Frisco, Texas; Franziska Borneff, Hidden Valley High School, Cave Spring, Virginia; Daniel Mathew, Poolesville High School, Poolesville, Maryland; and Kosha Upadhyay, Bellevue High School, Bellevue, Washington.

Read the news release.

Call for Nominations for ACM Awards

Each year, ACM recognizes technical and professional achievements through its Awards Program, and seeks your help in expanding and diversifying the nomination pool. 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.

Call for ACM Advanced Member Grade 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, 2024.

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, 2024.

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 June 3, 2024.

PUBLIC POLICY

Milestone: ACM TechBrief Issue 10 Released

ACM's global Technology Policy Council has issued Automated Vehicles, the tenth in its popular TechBrief policy paper series. The authors, led by US Technology Policy Committee Chair Larry Medsker, make the key point (among others) that "[f]ully automated AVs may never be able to operate safely without a human’s active attention." ACM TechBriefs have now been downloaded more than 60,000 times since late 2021. All are archived here. Have an idea for a TechBrief topic? Interested in possibly authoring one? Let us know!

Laws for LAWS? TPC Webinar Tackles Truly Hot Topic

"Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems," aka "LAWS," were the focus of a spirited and wide-ranging HotTopics webinar in late April. "Death by Algorithm: The Use, Control, and Legality of Lethal and Other Autonomous Weapons Systems" featured expert panelists Ronald Arkin, retired US military officers Gary Corn and Jack Shanahan, and USTPC's own Vice Chair Jody Westby who also organized the event. USTPC Chair Larry Medsker moderated the panel. Descriptions and full video of all past HotTopics programs are archived here online.

See Something, Say Something: Europe TPC Chair Shapes Key European Commission AI Paper

A "scoping paper" drafted to guide the work of the European Commission was entirely missing the critical concept of AI explainability...until, that is, ACM Europe Technology Policy Committee (ETPC) Chair Chris Hankin called that to the attention of the EC's prestigious Group of Chief Scientific Advisors. Due to Chris' invited "intervention" at the Advisors' recent physical meeting in Brussels, the paper now includes the recommendation that the Commission "[s]upport epistemic evaluation of AI in science to improve the understanding of its limits in research." Well played!

Privacy and Security the Focus of Two USTPC Agency Comments

ACM's US Technology Policy Committee (USTPC) recently drew on its members' expertise to comment in two important administrative proceedings. In February comments responding to a published request from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), USTPC urged the agency to incorporate long-established privacy and security by design principles, particularly "by integrating human factors from the outset." In April, the committee weighed in on implementation of the President's Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence in detailed comments to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The agency sought public input on how privacy impact assessments (PIAs) may be more effective at mitigating privacy risks.

The February DHS filing effort was led by USTPC Security Subcommittee member Josiah Dykstra and Subcommittee Co-Chair Carl Landwehr. The April OMB submission was led by Privacy Subcommittee Chair Brian Dean and USTPC Vice Chair Jody Westby, with contributions by committee members Jean Camp, Peter Neumann, Neeti Pokhriyal, and Arnon Rosenthal. Seven other USTPC members acknowledged in the April filing also contributed.

PUBLISHING NEWS

CACM Relaunched as Open Access, Web-First Publication

ACM has relaunched Communications of the ACM (CACM) as a web-first publication, accessible to all without charge—including the entire backfile of CACM articles. First published in 1958, CACM is one of the most respected magazines serving computing and IT professionals. The web-first model will allow ACM to publish articles more rapidly than before so that readers can keep abreast of the lightning-fast changes in the computing field. At the same time, researchers will be able to reference and cite valuable information and research from CACM articles more quickly. This marks another important milestone in ACM's ongoing transition to a fully open access publisher. Learn more here.

AI Letters Journal: Call for Proposals

ACM is seeking editorial participation from community members in launching AI Letters, a proposed new journal for rapid publication of significant results in AI and machine learning. ACM community members who have the necessary expertise, energy, and enthusiasm to help develop this proposal and participate in the launch and editorial oversight of this important new journal should contact ACM at [email protected].

acmqueue: "Developer Ecosystems for Software Safety: Continuous Assurance at Scale"

Christoph Kern, of Google, explains how designing developer ecosystems as safe environments allows us to achieve continuous assurance at scale. It provides confidence that every production release of every application of supported archetypes satisfies desired safety and security invariants. Read the full article here.

Inaugural ACM Journal Issues

The inaugural issue of ACM Journal on Autonomous Transportation Systems (JATS) is now available for download. JATS covers the topics in design, analysis, and control of autonomous transportation systems. The area of autonomous transportation systems is at a critical point where issues related to data, models, computation, and scale are increasingly important. Similarly, multiple disciplines including computer science, electrical engineering, civil engineering, etc., are approaching these problems with a significant growth in research activity. For further information and t o submit your manuscript, please visit the journal homepage.
The inaugural issue of ACM Journal on Responsible Computing (JRC) is now available for download. JRC publishes 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. For further information and to submit your manuscript, please visit the journal homepage.
ACM and IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics) have announced the publication of the first issues of ACM/IMS Journal of Data Science (J DS), a new peer-reviewed publication. The scope of the journal is multi-disciplinary and broad, spanning statistics, machine learning, computer systems, and the societal implications of data science. JDS accepts original papers as well as novel surveys that summarize and organize critical subject areas. The ACM/IMS Journal of Data Science is a Gold Open Access publication, permanently and freely available online for anyone, anywhere to read.

Journals Welcome New Editors-in-Chief

ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI) welcomes Iolanda Leite (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden) and James Young (University of Manitoba, Canada) as Co-Editors-in-Chief. Their appointments are from March 1, 2024 to February 28, 2027.
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) welcomes Sam H. Noh (Virginia Tech, USA) and Robert van Renesse (Cornell University, USA) as Co-Editors-in-Chief. Their appointments are from May 1, 2024 to April 30, 2027.
ACM Transactions on Internet of Things (TIOT) welcomes new Editor-in-Chief Mo Li (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) for a term starting May 15, 2024 and ending May 14, 2027.
PACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (PACMCGIT) welcomes new Editor-in-Chief Michael Doggett (Lund University, Sweden), for a term starting May 15, 2024 and ending May 14, 2027.
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS) welcomes Heng Zu (University of Florida) as the new Editor-in-Chief for the term of May 15, 2024 to May 14, 2027.
PACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems (POMACS) welcomes John C.S. Lui (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) as the new Editor-in-Chief for the term of May 15, 2024 to May 14, 2027.

Journals Seeking Editors-in-Chief

ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS) is seeking a new Editor-in-Chief. Nominations are due June 17, 2024 for a three-year term beginning on September 1. We welcome nominations, including joint self-nominations for Co-EiCs. The EiC appointment may be renewed at most one time. For more information please visit the TOMS nominations page.
ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) is seeking a new Editor-in-Chief. Nominations are due June 14, 2024 for a three-year term beginning on August 1. Self-nominations are encouraged and should include a statement of the candidate's vision for the future development of JOCCH. For more information please visit the nominations page.
Digital Government: Research and Practice (DGOV) is seeking a new Editor-in-Chief. Nominations are due June 17, 2024 for a three-year term beginning on August 1. As the previous EiC role was handled by two co-EiCs working in a partnership, we also welcome joint nominations, including joint self-nominations, for co-EiCs. For more information please visit the DGOV nominations page.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) is seeking a new Editor-in-Chief. Nominations, including self-nominations, are invited for a three-year term beginning on November 1, 2024. We will consider applications for single EiCs or pairs of co-EiCs. Nominations are due June 30. For more information please visit the TOCHI nominations page.

New ACM Books

Digital Dreams Have Become Nightmares: What We Must Do by Ronald M. Baecker and Jonathan Grudin offers a compelling discussion of the digital dreams that have come true, their often-unintended side effects (nightmares), and what must be done to counteract the nightmares. The book is a presentation of what digital technology professionals need to know about these topics and the actions they should undertake individually and in support of other citizens, societal initiatives, and government.
Pick, Click, Flick!: The Story of Interaction Techniques by Brad A. Myers provides a comprehensive study of the many ways to interact with computers and computerized devices. It is written for anyone interested in interaction techniques, including computer scientists and designers working on human-computer interaction, as well as implementers and consumers who want to understand and get the most out of their digital devices.
Published in celebration of ACM-W’s 30th birthday, Rendering History: The Women of ACM-W by Gloria Childress Townsend is divided into three parts The first section details the evolution of ACM-W’s projects. The next has women of ACM-W tell their own stories. And final section of the book provides an annotated bibliography of the research that launched ACM-W and continued to inform its projects over the next 30 years.

ACM Open: Institutions in India, Hong Kong, and Denmark Sign Agreements

ACM is pleased to announce new ACM Open participants in India with 63 centrally funded institutions signed for calendar year 2024 and four individual institutions signed for calendar years 2024 through 2026, via the Global Information Systems Technology (GIST) consortium. We are also happy to announce two consortiums have recently joined ACM Open: the Hong Kong Consortium and the Royal Danish Library. If your university has yet to join, please reach out to your Department Head or Librarian or contact us at [email protected]. A list of ACM Open participating institutions, including those that recently joined, is available here.

SIG NEWS / AWARDS

2024 ACM SIG Elections

The following SIGs are holding elections ending June 10, 2024, 12:00 pm ET (4:00 pm UTC): SIGACT, SIGCHI, SIGDA, SIGPLAN, SIGSOFT.

The following SIGs are holding elections ending May 17, 2024 12:00 pm ET (4:00 pm UTC): SIGITE, SIGSIM.

Visit the SIG Election Voting Page to view the candidate slates and biographies for the SIGs holding elections.

2024 SIGCHI Awards Announced

The winners of the 2024 ACM SIGCHI Awards have been announced. The recipients of the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award include Susanne Bødker (Denmark's Aarhus University), Jodi Forlizzi (Carnegie Mellon University), James A. Landay (Stanford University), and Wendy Mackay (Inria). Elizabeth Churchill (Google) was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award. These and other award recipients can be found here.

2024 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award Announced

Catholijn Jonker, a full Professor of Interactive Intelligence at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science of the Delft University of Technology, is recipient of the 2024 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award. Jonker is a leader in the field of human-machine interaction, in particular regarding modeling the cognitive processes and concepts involved in negotiation and teamwork. Read the full story here.

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.

DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION

ACM-W Global Chapter Summit 2024

The inaugural ACM-W Global Chapter Summit 2024, will be held on May 22, 2024, 11 am ET (3 pm UTC). This online event will offer a unique opportunity for participants from around the globe to connect, regardless of their location. The ACM-W Global Chapter Summit will showcase the successes and challenges faced by various vibrant ACM-W chapters worldwide. It will also serve as a platform for new and emerging chapters to engage with established ones, fostering knowledge exchange and mutual inspiration. Attendance is free, but registration is required.

ACM Celebrates Asian American Pacific Islander Month

During Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May 2024, ACM spotlights Asian American and Pacific Islander pioneers and luminaries in the field of computing, whose ingenuity and entrepreneurship have helped shape the world we live in today. Who are your AAPI heroes that have inspired you to pursue computer science? Follow the series via #APAHM and leave us a message on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram.

ACM Celebrated Black History Month

ACM celebrated inclusion/bhm-2024">2024 Black History Month with an interactive Q&A video series in which computing students around the world posed burning questions to Black experts who shared their wisdom and experiences as they address questions such as what role does technology play in addressing social issues, how can a diverse perspective enhance the impact of technological issues, how do you envision the future of computing in terms of inclusivity and diversity, among others.

ACM Celebrated Women's History Month

This Women's History Month, ACM proudly commemorated the groundbreaking achievements of women in computing, highlighting their contributions with a curated selection of past People of ACM interviews, ByteCast episodes, TechTalks sessions, and clips from previous diversity panels which were showcased on ACM's social media accounts throughout the month of March. Additionally, in partnership with Rob O'Connor's podcast, The Machine, ACM Fellow Nuria Oliver discussed her career journey as a woman in the computing field.

womENcourage–Celebration of Women in Computing

The 11th ACM Celebration of Women in Computing: womENcourage 2024, will be hosted at Escuela Politécnica Superior of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, June 26-28, 2024. Open to all genders, this event is aimed at celebrating the role and impact of women in computing and supporting participants at different stages in their STEM careers. Learn more here.

MEMBERSHIP

Featured Member Benefit: Travel Discount Program

Are you planning for summer vacation? ACM is pleased to offer exclusive hotel, car rental and entertainment discounts to our members through Local Hospitality. Save time and money on your next trip by visiting the ACM Travel Discount Program page.

LEARNING PROGRAMS

ACM ByteCast Interviews

ACM ByteCast is a podcast series from ACM’s Practitioner Board in which hosts Rashmi Mohan, Bruke Kifle, and Scott Hanselman interview researchers, practitioners, and innovators who are at the intersection of computing research and practice. In each monthly episode, guests will share their experiences, the lessons they’ve learned, and their own visions for the future of computing. Recent ByteCast interviews include.

2022 ACM Fellow Jacki O'Neill, Director of the Microsoft Africa Research Institute (MARI) in Nairobi, Kenya, traces her path from discovering an interest in computing at the University of Manchester, the benefits and challenges of collaborating across different multidisciplinary teams, and offers some exciting future directions and visions for computing in Africa and advice for making a social impact in the field.
2021 ACM Fellow Edward Y. Chang, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, discusses his career, from studying Operations Research at UC Berkeley to graduate work at Stanford University, and shares his work at HTC in Taipei, which focused on healthcare projects, as well as his current interest, studying AI and consciousness.
ACM Fellow Rosalind Picard, a scientist, inventor, engineer, and faculty member of MIT’s Media Lab, talks about her work with the Affective Computing Research Group, about the importance of data accuracy, the implications of machine learning and language models to her field, and privacy and consent when it comes to reading into people’s emotional states.
Partha Talukdar, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google Research India, discusses the role of language in machine learning and whether current AI systems are merely memorizing and reproducing data or are actually capable of understanding. He also talks about his recent focus on inclusive and equitable language technology development through multilingual-multimodal Large Language Modeling.
Francesca Rossi, IBM Fellow and AI Ethics Global Leader, and current President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), shares how experiences with multidisciplinary work in computer science drew her to AI and ethics, the challenges of synchronizing with people from a variety of backgrounds at IBM, her involvement in the development of AI ethics guidelines in Europe, and more.

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

Featured TechTalks

ACM members and non-members alike are welcome to attend our popular series of free TechTalks by expert industry professionals, distinguished ACM award laureates, and visionary researchers from industry and academia. Recent TechTalks include.

In "Programming Distributed Systems," Mae Milano, Assistant Professor at Princeton University, shows how to use ideas from programming languages to make programming at scale easier without sacrificing performance, correctness, or expressive power in the process. You’ll see how slight tweaks to modern imperative programming languages can provably eliminate common errors due to replica consistency or concurrency, and how new language designs can unlock new systems designs, yielding both more comprehensible protocols and better performance.
For Software Engineering practitioners, the past 10 years have seen an explosive rise in the adoption of continuous integration systems and automated software testing. Having sufficient test coverage is now considered key to maintaining enough control of large software systems to make changes quickly and reliably. In Design Is Testability, Titus Winters, Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe, argues that long-ignored concepts from software design are essential in understanding how to test appropriately.

Find our entire archive of TechTalks here.

STUDENT NEWS

Upcoming ACM Europe Council Seasonal Schools

ACM Europe Seasonal Schools focus on educating researchers on a general or specialized topic over the duration of one or two weeks and involve a small number of students. Usually, all students stay together in the same place, the venue of the school lectures, and ideally this is the case for all their instructors as well. This co-existence of everyone during lectures as well as social activities is important as it facilitates learning, the formation of groups that may continue to interact beyond the duration of the school and connects upcoming researchers and other computing professionals with ACM.

2024 ACM Seasonal Schools Now Accepting Applications

8th Summer School on Computational Interaction: June 3-7, 2024 - University of Luxembourg, Belval Campus, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
ACM Summer School on Accessible and Inclusive Technologies: June 24-27, 2024 - Birmingham City University (BCU), Birmingham, U.K.
2024 ACM Europe Summer School on “HPC Computer Architectures for AI and Dedicated Applications”: September 2-6, 2024 - Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain

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 ISCE 2024. The next conferences accepting submissions are:

ICSE 2025, April 6-May 4, 2025, deadline November 17, 2024
SIGCE 2025, February 26-March 1, 2025, deadline October 14, 2024
SC 2024, November 17-22, 2024, deadline August 9, 2024
ASE 2024, October 27-November 4, 2024, deadline July 22, 2024
SPLASH 2024, October 20-25, 2024, deadline July 8, 2024
ICCAD 2024, October 27-31, 2024, deadline June 13, 2024
MODELS 2024, September 22-27, 2024, deadline May 31, 2024
ICFP 2024, September 2-7, 2024, deadline May 23, 2024

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. 35 Student and 12 Professional Chapters were started in China, France, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the Unites States.

ACM welcomes the new chapters that were chartered January 24, 2024 through April 23, 2024.

DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS PROGRAM

ACM Distinguished Speaker: Heloisa Candello

Heloisa Candello is a research scientist and a manager of the Human-centered & Responsible Tech group, at the IBM Research laboratory in Brazil. She holds a PhD in Computer Science in Interactive Technologies from the University of Brighton, UK. Her lectures include “Artificial Intelligence and Social Impact," "Generative AI: Design and HCI Perspectives," and more. For more information about Candello, please visit her DSP speaker information page.

All speakers are available through ACM's ACM Distinguished Speaker Program.

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ACM CAREER & JOB CENTER

The Ultimate Career Development Destination

Connecting with the right employers in computing can be a daunting task. The ACM Career & Job Center is a true career planning destination. Whether you are seeking Career Insights, Career Advice, or Career Coaching, ACM can help.

Read past issues of MemberNet online in our archive.

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