ACM Breakthrough in Computing Award Goes to Jason Cong
ACM has named Jason Cong, the holder of the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, as the recipient of the 2024 ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award. Cong is recognized for fundamental contributions to the design and automation of field-programmable systems and customizable computing. During his career in both academia and industry, Cong developed an extraordinary array of tools to automate integrated circuit design FPGAs.
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.
The Importance of Distrust in Trusting Digital Worker Chatbots
Research shows that while trust is important, anthropomorphism counts more in the decision to hire an AI agent. In this article from the April issue of Communications of the ACM, David Gefen, et al. present a study that shows that how human-like an AI agent appears has a greater influence on hiring decisions than trust. Familiarity fosters psychological comfort, making anthropomorphism a critical factor in AI acceptance. And while trust encourages AI adoption, distrust is a separate construct with unique effects on user experience. Managing both is key to evaluating AI adoption in professional settings.
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.