New ACM Officers Elected to Lead amid Digital Changes Facing Computing Community

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The Association for Computing Machinery
Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession

Contact: Virginia Gold
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NEW YORK, May 23, 2014 – ACM (The Association for Computing Machinery) today announced the election of new officers to lead the enterprise in a rapidly evolving digital environment.  The new team, comprised of distinguished computer scientists from leading academic and corporate organizations, will be headed by Alexander L. Wolf of Imperial College London, UK.  He takes the helm as ACM President for a two-year term beginning July 1.  He will be joined by Vicki L. Hanson of the University of Dundee and Rochester Institute of Technology as Vice President, and Erik Altman of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as Secretary/Treasurer.  Also elected as Members-at-Large for a four-year term are Per O. Stenström of Chalmers University of Technology in Goteborg, Sweden and Cherri Pancake of Oregon State University.

President-elect Wolf said he is committed to creating a climate in which fresh ideas are generated to address the challenges confronting ACM in the rapidly evolving computing community.  He cited as top priorities the rise of computer-mediated, cost-free, dynamic social networks as well as the forces reshaping relationships among authors, readers, reviewers, publishers and libraries.

Wolf, a Professor with a Chair in Computing at Imperial College London, is known for seminal contributions to software architecture and deployment, as well as automated process discovery, an area related to the business intelligence field.  He helped shape ACM’s role in advancing the educators, practitioners, researchers and students at the core of computing through his active participation.  He was Secretary/Treasurer of ACM, and served as chair of the ACM SIG Governing Board.  He currently serves on the ACM Europe Council, and is past chair of the ACM Software System Award Committee.  Named an ACM Fellow, Wolf is a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society and holds a UK Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. 

Vicki Hanson, incoming ACM Vice President, said that while ACM has never had as much impact as it does now, the organization faces rapidly changing technical and professional environments.  She identified the expanding global community as the impetus for ACM to develop strategies that connect with local technical communities through better understanding of diverse cultural, educational, and professional contexts.   

Hanson is Professor of Inclusive Technologies at the University of Dundee as well as Distinguished Professor of Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Research Staff Member Emeritus from IBM Research.  She works on issues of inclusion for older and disabled people with research on accessible and usable technology for diverse populations.   She previously served as ACM Secretary/Treasurer.  A past chair of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing (SIGACCESS), she is a founder and co-editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing.  She is currently leading work funded by Research Councils UK.  An ACM Fellow and a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, she is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and holds a UK Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, which benefits outstanding scientists.

Newly elected ACM Secretary/Treasurer Erik Altman highlighted his interest in raising awareness of ACM’s valued lifelong learning and career development programs among the many practitioner members that ACM serves.  He cited the extensive online books offerings as well as the Distinguished Speakers Program for sharing expertise around the globe.

Altman is Manager, Dynamic Optimization Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where he directs projects on performance tooling and Liquid Metal for heterogeneous systems.  Currently chair of ACM’s SIG Governing Board and 37 constituent Special Interest Groups, he is a past chair of ACM SIGMICRO (Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture). Altman was one of the original architects of the Cell processor chip in Sony’s Playstation 3, and an originator of IBM's DAISY binary translation project, which enabled high performance and total binary compatibility with PowerPC for VLIW architectures. He served as guest editor of IEEE Computer, the Journal of Instruction Level Parallelism (JILP), and the IBM Journal of Research and Development. He also currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Micro.

About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery www.acm.org, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.