ACM, AAAI Recognize Peter Stone for Significant Contributions to AI
Peter Stone, Professor, University of Texas at Austin and Chief Scientist, Sony AI, receives the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award for significant contributions to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence (AI), especially in reinforcement learning, multiagent systems, transfer learning, and intelligent robotics. As a leading figure in AI research, Stone has fundamentally advanced how autonomous agents learn, plan, and collaborate. His groundbreaking work on reinforcement learning algorithms has enabled robots to acquire skills through experience.
Software System Award Goes to Developers of MPICH
William Gropp, University of Illinois; Pavan Balaji, Meta; Rajeev Thakur, Yanfei Guo, Kenneth Raffenetti, and Hui Zhou (all of Argonne National Laboratory), receive the ACM Software System Award for MPICH , which has powered 30 years of progress in computational science and engineering by providing scalable, robust, and portable communication software for parallel computers. The development of the MPICH software system began in 1992 as proof-of-concept for the emerging Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard.
Hugo Krawczyk Receives Kanellakis Award
Hugo Krawczyk, Senior Principal Scientist, Amazon, receives the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for pioneering and lasting contributions to the theoretical foundations of cryptographically secure communications, and to the protocols that form the security foundations of the Internet. Krawczyk’s most high-profile contribution is his work on the SIGMA authenticated key-exchange protocol. SIGMA has become a cornerstone of the most widely used communication protocols on the Internet. It is now implemented in billions of devices and web browsers, making it a fundamental component of online security.
ACM Reaffirms Its Commitment to Our Mission and Core Values
ACM is aware that many in our community are concerned about potential negative effects of recent Executive Orders by the new US Administration on our work in both the US and globally. This includes concerns about possible consequences for ACM publishing, conferences, education, and practitioner efforts, as well as concerns about possible harms to our work on inclusion for a strong and diverse technology workforce.
ACM reaffirms its commitment to our mission and core values in all our scientific and educational activities. This includes global scientific and educational efforts dedicated to advancing the art, science, engineering, and application of computing. We will continue to serve both professional and public interests by fostering the open exchange of information and by promoting the highest professional and ethical standards.
ACM’s commitment to its mission, guided by its core values, is unchanged. We will work with members of the community to understand how new Executive Orders may affect their work as it relates to scientific, educational, and community development efforts.
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 backlog of CACM articles. First published in 1958, CACM is one of the most respected information technology magazines. 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.
Ransomware: Extortion Is My Business
Ransomware is one of the most harmful and costly cyber threats in existence, with potentially devastating consequences. It is a daily threat to individuals, companies, organizations, and states alike. The attack surface covers all digital infrastructure—information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT)—extending to industrial control systems (ICS), passing through the software supply chain, and cloud providers. In this article from the May issue of Communications of the ACM, Jean-Yves Marion provides a comprehensive overview of the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) observed in ransomware campaigns.
Program Merge: What's Deep Learning Got to Do with It?
If you regularly work with open-source code or produce software for a large organization, you're already familiar with many of the challenges posed by collaborative programming at scale. And the scale of the problem has gotten much worse. This is what led a group of researchers at MSR (Microsoft Research) to take on the task of complicated merges as a grand program-repair challenge—one they believed might be addressed at least in part by machine learning. To understand the thinking that led to this effort and then follow where that led, Erik Meijer and Terry Coatta spoke with three of the leading figures in the MSR research effort, called DeepMerge
Deterministic Record-and-Replay
ACM Queue’s "Research for Practice" serves up expert-curated guides to the best of computing research, and relates these breakthroughs to the challenges that software engineers face every day. In this installment, Research for Practice covers the topic of deterministic record-and-replay. Deterministic record-and-replay technologies enable a faithful re-execution of a program that ran in the past. But accomplishing this requires that any nondeterministic inputs to the program be logged during execution. The selection of techniques presented here is curated by Andrew Quinn, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.
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ACM Code of Ethics
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Send Email as Your "@acm.org" Address
ACM is excited to announce a new enhancement of to the widely used ACM email forwarding service. Through a partnership with MailRoute, SMTP Auth Relay is now available for member use. To start sending fully authenticated email as your @acm.org address, simply log in at https://myacm.acm.org and click the "SMTP Auth Relay" link.