ACM Press Release

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Virginia Gold

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IMMEDIATE

ACM'S NEW ELECTED LEADERS AIM TO IMPROVE COMPUTING'S IMAGE

New York, June 16, 2004 -- David Patterson has been elected ACM President for a two-year term beginning July 1. A computer science professor at University of California, Berkeley, Patterson pledged to extend ACM's effectiveness by recruiting new IT professionals, improving the image of computing among high schoolers, and attracting "big idea" papers to ACM's conferences. Patterson, who developed the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), and is a former chief scientist for Sun Microsystems' Networked Storage Division, brings both academic and corporate experience to his role as ACM's highest elected officer. Also elected to two year terms were Vice President Stuart Feldman, vice president of IBM for Internet Technology, and Secretary-Treasurer Laura Hill, assistant director for Sun Microsystems Laboratories.

Patterson cited local ACM-branded events, growth in programs for underrepresented groups, and novel idea sessions at SIG conferences as ways to broaden computing's appeal. He chaired Berkeley's CS Division of 1000 students and 100 faculty and staff in 1990, and was Chief Scientist at Scale 8, a startup company, in 2000. He also headed ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH), and was chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA) for two terms.

Feldman joined IBM in 1995, and is responsible for creating new applications technologies and corporate strategies relating to the Internet. As ACM vice president, he plans to address the needs of the growing practice-oriented computing population. He has urged more services to computing professionals outside the US, and greater visibility to policy-makers and potential members. An ACM Fellow, Feldman was chair of SIGPLAN and founding chair of SIGecom. He also presided as co-chair of WWW2004, the World Wide Web Conference and received the 2003 ACM Software System Award this month.

Laura Hill, ACM's new Secretary/Treasurer, has emphasized the benefits of community in helping ACM strengthen its underrepresented constituencies. She advocates new forms of community enabled by digital capacities. As a technologist in the financial industry, she helped absorb emerging technologies into the application portfolios. She moved to Sun Microsystems as Director of IT Application Technology and then to Sun Research Labs as Director of Java Research, Director of Technology Transfer, and finally Director of the Labs. She has been an active leader of OOPLSA (Object-Oriented Programming Systems and Applications Conference) since 1995.

Members-at-Large elected to four-year terms are:

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, director of Laboratorie de Recherche en Informatique (LRI), the laboratory for computer science Universite Paris-Sud, where he created the Human-Computer Interaction research group. He advocates raising the computer industry's awareness of how new technologies impact on end users.
Wendy Hall, who heads the school of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and has been president of the British Computer Society since 2003. Her goals are to increase international collaboration within ACM, and to attract more women into computer science.
Barbara Ryder, a professor of computer science at Rutgers University, served as chair of the 2003 Federated Conference on Research in Computing and is a Fellow of ACM. Her priorities are for ACM to take a more active, visible role on public policy and technology issues, and to increase ACM's organizational focus.
David Wise, former ACM vice president and secretary-treasurer, who teaches computer science at Indiana University. He is a co-discoverer of lazy evaluation and inventor of RAM with on-board reference counting. His challenge is to develop ACM's resources and to assure their access and affordability to researchers, practitioners and libraries.

Elected to a two-year term is John "Scooter" Morris. As a Distinguished Systems Architect at Genentech, he helped define and implement the firm's computing environment and was a contributor to the "Internet Strategy Handbook." He is currently part of the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualizaton and Informatics (RBVI) at the University of California, San Francisco. He plans to focus on ACM's relationship with its Special Interest Groups.

About ACM
ACM (www.acm.org) is widely recognized as the premier organization for computing professionals, delivering a broad array of resources that advance the computing and IT disciplines, enable professional development, and promote policies and research that benefit society.

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ACM/Press Release
Last Updated June 17, 2004 by Edwin Rodriguez

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