ACM A.M. Turing Laureate and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin E. Allen Emerson passed away on October 15, 2024. He received the Turing Award together with Edmund Clarke and Joseph Sifakis for their role in developing model-checking into a highly effective verification technology that was widely adopted in the hardware and software industries. This method provides an algorithmic means of verifying whether or not an abstract model representing a system or design, satisfies a formal specification expressed in temporal logic. Emerson also received the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for his part in the invention of symbolic model checking.

ACM Fellows Yolanda Gil and Juan Gilbert have been appointed by President Joe Biden as Members of the National Science Board. Gil is Principal Scientist and Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. Gilbert is Recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor, UF Distinguished Professor & Department Chair at the University of Florida.

ACM Fellow Fei-Fei Li has been named as one of Fortune magazine's 100 Most Powerful Women. Li earned the nickname “godmother” of AI after inventing ImageNet, a large image database for training and testing models to visually detect and classify objects. Her startup World Labs builds “large world models,” which can interact with the three-dimensional world. While on temporary leave from Stanford University, she continues to oversee the school’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. In 2018, Li was named an ACM Fellow for contributions in building large knowledge bases for machine learning and visual understanding.

ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Geoffrey Hinton has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics along with John J. Hopfield "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks." Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data. Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures. Hinton received the 2018 A.M. Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.

ACM Member Nicola Dell has been named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow. She was cited for developing technology interventions to address the needs of overlooked populations, such as survivors of intimate partner violence. Dell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. She is also the Director of Technological Innovation for the Initiative on Home Care Work in the Center for Applied Research on Work (CAROW) at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and the Steering Committee Chair of ACM COMPASS.

On September 14th, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi presented former ACM president and Verified Voting Board Chair Barbara Simons with an award for her decades of commitment to securing our elections at Verified Voting’s 20th anniversary celebration. Simons has served on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission since 2008, and as a computer scientist who believes in the power of paper, she continues to champion secure, transparent elections.

ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Yoshua Bengio is concerned about the ability of OpenAI's new o1 model to deceive, noting it has a "far superior ability to reason than its predecessors." Said Bengio, "In general, the ability to deceive is very dangerous, and we should have much stronger safety tests to evaluate that risk and its consequences in o1's case."

A group of AI pioneers—including Turing Award recipients Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Yao, and Geoffrey Hinton, and ACM Fellow Stuart Russell—released a statement on September 16 expressing their concerns that the capabilities of the technology could exceed that of its creators in a matter of years, leading "to catastrophic outcomes for all of humanity." They also proposed that countries establish AI safety authorities to register AI systems within their borders and collaborate to identify red lines and warning signs for the technology.

The EU plans to launch the European digital identity (eID) by 2026, allowing citizens to use a single digital wallet app to manage finances, access services, sign contracts, and travel. ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Tim Berners-Lee and his startup Inrupt recently launched a universal data wallet infrastructure that enables interoperability across multiple servers, securely hosting data in personal data "pods," with the user maintaining control. Berners-Lee said he expects the EU to set an “important bar” for wallets and enforce “a standard” for credentials.

C. Gordon Bell, called the “Frank Lloyd Wright of computers” by Datamation magazine, died on May 17 at the age of 89. Bell was the master architect in the effort to create smaller, affordable, interactive computers that could be clustered into a network. He built the first time-sharing computer and was among a group of engineers whose designs formed the bridge between the room-size models of the mainframe era and the advent of the personal computer. He also sponsored the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for work in parallel computing and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling.

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).

ACM Athena Lecturer Award recipient Andrea Goldsmith is being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame Class of 2024. She is being honored for her invention of Adaptive Beamforming for Multi-Antenna Wi-Fi, which has shaped the performance of wireless networking and enabled fast, reliable wireless service around the world, in addition to several other technological advances. She received the Athena Award for contributions to the theory and practice of adaptive wireless communications and sustained translation of theoretic results into commercial technologies and industry standards.

Time magazine has named ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio to its list of the 100 Most Influential People of 2024. Bengio, a leading AI researcher, has been vocal about AI safety and the possibility of catastrophic outcomes related to future AI. Throughout his career, his research has been instrumental in shaping the world’s understanding of AI’s potential. He has also served as an adviser for the UN Secretary-General and the UK AI Safety Institute.

 In a recent episode of the podcast The Disruption is Now, host Greg Matusky chats with Michelle Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Juji, Inc., former Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TIIS) and current editorial board member of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST). The episode, "Cultivating Compassionate AI," delves into he merging of empathy and technology, exploring how AI can enhance our lives and workspaces. In it, Zhou shares insights on creating AI that understands and interacts with humanity on a deeper level.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) named ACM Fellow Gregory D. Hager to head up its Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). Hager is a Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. His research covers many areas of AI and machine learning, including activity recognition and detection from video data; collaborative and vision-based robotics; and medical applications of machine learning, image analysis, and robotics.

ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, shared predictions about his invention's future over the next 35 years. “Some people worry about whether, in 35 years, AI will be more powerful than us,” Berners-Lee said. “One of the things I predict—but it’s something we may have to fight for—is you will have an AI assistant, which you can trust, and it works for you, like a doctor.” Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the Swiss particle physics research center.

ACM Fellow Fei-Fei Li of Stanford University—known as the "godmother of AI"—pressed President Joe Biden following his State of the Union address to fund a national warehouse of computing power and datasets to ensure the nation's leading AI researchers can keep pace with big tech firms. Said Li, "The public sector is now significantly lagging in resources and talent compared to that of industry. This will have profound consequences because industry is focused on developing technology that is profit-driven, whereas public sector AI goals are focused on creating public goods."

ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Robert E. Kahn, one of the "fathers of the Internet," has been awarded the 2024 IEEE Medal of Honor. The IEEE Foundation cited Kahn’s work in packet communication technologies and foundations of the Internet as the basis for the award. Kahn, along with Vint Cerf, received the A.M. Turing Award for pioneering work on internetworking, including the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols TCP/IP, and for inspired leadership in networking. Kahn and Cerf founded the non-profit Internet Society in 1992.

Recently, ACM President Yannis Ioannidis was interviewed by Stephen Ibaraki, Global Chairman REDDS Capital. In the interview, Ioannidis discusses a wide range of timely subjects such as data management and digital storytelling, AI advancements and specialized computing, and his time as ACM President. He speaks on ACM's role in achieving UN sustainable development goals and in climate change mitigation, as well as its role in serving diverse global needs and the future of computing. Finally, Yannis discusses “ACM 4.0”—an effort to address the changes needed for the organization’s next 25 years, and his plans to seek a second term as ACM President to continue his initiatives.

Francesca Rossi, Co-Author of ACM's "TechBrief: Generative Artificial Intelligence," appeared on The Tech Talks Daily Podcast to discuss the pressing issues surrounding the rapid commercialization of generative AI technologies. Rossi brings her extensive expertise as an IBM Fellow and AI ethics global leader to the shed light on the implications of AI on the workforce—with a startling revelation from ACM’s TechBrief—the need for comprehensive AI policies incorporating end-to-end governance approaches, and addressing risks at every AI development and deployment stage. Rossi also shares insights into how IBM addresses bias in AI systems, fairness and inclusivity, and setting industry standards for ethical AI practices.

Appearing on PBS NewsHour, A.M. Turing Laureate and Vice President/Chief Internet Evangelist at Google Vint Cerf offers "A Brief But Spectacular Take on the Future of the Internet." Here, Cerf expounds on how the beginning of the internet seemed not so much a plan as a posed problem, what is needed to make the internet truly accessable for all, how the fears of artificial intelligence may be overblown but that AI shoud be handled with care, and the need for international cooperation to create laws that will ensure online safety and security for all.

Programming language pioneer and A.M. Turing Laureate Niklaus Wirth passed away on January 1, 2024. Wirth created the Euler and PL360 languages, breaking new ground in formal separation of syntax and semantics. Working with Tony Hoare, Wirth used Euler as the basis of Algol-W which then became the basis for Pascal, which provided a foundation for future computer languages, systems, and architectural research for years to come. He also popularized the adage of "Wirth's law," which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. He was the recipient of the 1984 ACM A.M. Turing Award, the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, and the Marcel Benoist Prize, among other honors.

In an effort to form a single global body to govern artificial intelligence technology, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has announced a 39-person advisory board to help the international body determine what global rules were needed to oversee AI. Included on this board is ACM Fellow, former ACM President, and current Co-Chair of the ACM Publications Board Dame Wendy Hall, who has already served as an advisor to the UK government as well as other governments and companies around the world. The group would report back by the end of the year and publish its final nonbinding recommendations next summer.

President Joe Biden honored University of Florida computer science professor and ACM Fellow Juan Gilbert at the White House with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for pioneering a universal voting system that makes voting more reliable and accessible for everyone and for increasing diversity in the computer science workforce. The National Medal of Technology and Innovation, or NMTI, is the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement, bestowed by the president of the United States on leading innovators for their outstanding contributions to America’s economic, environmental and social well-being. You can view the event here.

The HCII2024 Conference has announced that ACM CEO Vicki Hanson has been chosen to receive the 2024 HCI Medal for Societal Impact. The HCI Medal for Societal Impact was established in 2022 to be awarded to academics, researchers, or professionals in recognition of the impact of their work in the field of human-computer interaction on society. The medal will be conferred during the conference Opening Plenary Session, to be followed by the Keynote speech. The conference will take place June 29–July 4, 2024, in Washington DC.

A.M Turing Award recipient Vint Cerf has received the Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award. The Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes individuals with an established history of distinguished work who have made creative contributions and positive impact to the field of communications and to the development of the careers of others. ACM Fellow Hari Balakrishnan has received the 2023 Marconi Prize. The Marconi Prize is the flagship award of the Marconi Society, given annually to innovators who have made significant contributions to increasing digital inclusivity through the advancement of information and communications technology.