Last week, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), announced their election results. Among the new leadership was Computing Community Consortium Council Member, Elisa Bertino. She will begin her new two-year term as ACM Vice President on July 1. Bertino is a Professor of Computer Science and research director at CERIAS at Purdue University, and a Fellow of both ACM and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She has a long standing affiliation with ACM, formerly serving as the ACM Secretary/Treasurer, a 2019–2020 ACM Athena Lecturer and served on the editorial board for the ACM Transactions on Information and System Security. In addition, she is the Secretary/Treasurer John West, […]

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recently named 95 of its members as the new ACM Fellows for 2020.    One of the newly named members is former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Maja Matarić, University of Southern California, for her “contributions to socially assistive robotics and human-robot systems.” Matarić was a key contributor to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Roadmap, A 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research in the US, which was released in August 2019.  Several other individuals involved with the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Research Association – Widening Participation (CRA-WP) have been named Fellows. See the CRA Bulletin for the full list.  Additional information about the […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 28th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020), November 3-6th, 2020, online.  The emphasis of this track was on visionary ideas, long term challenges, and opportunities in research that are outside of the current mainstream topics of the field. First Place-Smartmedia: Locally & Contextually-Adapted Streaming Media Yaron Kanza (AT&T Labs-Research), David Gibbon (AT&T Labs-Research), Divesh Srivastava (AT&T Labs-Research), Valerie Yip (AT&T Labs-Research), Eric Zavesky (AT&T Labs-Research) Second Place-Leveraging geospatial data gateways to support the operational application of deep learning models (Vision Paper) Aiman Soliman (National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois), Jeffrey Terstriep […]

On day two of the Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) 2020, Robert Endre Tarjan and Donald Ervin Knuth engaged in a freewheeling conversation about mathematics, computer science, and art. Donald Knuth was the 1974 ACM A.M. Turing Award winner for “for his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the ‘art of computer programming’ through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.” Robert Tarjan won the Nevanlinna Prize in 1982 “for devising near-optimal algorithms for many graph-theoretic and geometric problems for the development and exploitation of data structures supporting efficient algorithms, and for contributing several algorithmic analyses of striking profundity […]

How can computing technology impact global health, particularly with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic? Shwetak Patel, 2018 ACM Prize in Computing winner and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member, addressed this question on the second day of the Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) 2020. Patel, an entrepreneur and professor of computer science at the University of Washington, won the 2018 Prize for “contributions to creative and practical sensing systems for sustainability and health.” During his presentation, Patel highlighted a few of the use cases of computing technology on healthcare: for instance, AI has improved screening and diagnostic capabilities by reading X-rays and radiology scans and the ubiquity of mobile phones makes them a great […]

By Cherri Pancake, ACM President As the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic continues, we at ACM would like to do what we can to help support the computing community. Many computing researchers and practitioners are now working remotely. In addition, teaching and learning have also moved online as more and more campuses close. We believe that ACM can help support research, discovery and learning during this time of crisis by opening the ACM Digital Library to all. For the next three months, there will be no fees assessed for accessing or downloading work published by ACM. We hope this will help researchers, practitioners and students maintain access to our publications as well as increasing visibility […]