Diversity Data Collection at ACM
ACM is deeply committed to fostering a scientific community that both supports and benefits from the talents of community members from a wide range of backgrounds. To this end, ACM has adopted new demographic questions developed by ACM’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council to understand current levels of participation and to gauge our success at advancing DEI. It is mandated that they be used throughout ACM for all activities, and responses will be required from all ACM authors, reviewers, conference attendees, volunteers, and members. Please take the time to fill out your questionnaire today.
ACM Boasts Strong Impact Factors
The journals of ACM once again had an impressive showing in the latest Journal Citation Reports release from Clarivate, with notable performances across the entire portfolio and fifteen journals receiving their first impact factors—including four titles from the innovative Proceedings of the ACM (PACM) program. ACM's flagship magazine Communications of the ACM (CACM) continued its dominance by receiving an all-time high impact factor of 22.7, placing it first in all three of its categories, and ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) which continued to ascend with an impact factor of 16.6, placing it third in the Computer Science, Theory & Methods category.
Ceasing Print Publication of ACM Journals and Transactions
ACM has made the decision to cease print publication for ACM’s journals and transactions as of January 2024. There were several motivations for this change: ACM wants to be as environmentally friendly as possible; print journals lack the new features and functionality of the electronic versions in the ACM Digital Library; and print subscriptions, which have been declining for years, have now reached a level where the time was right to sunset print. Please contact acmhelp@acm.org should you have any questions.
View on Demand: Celebrating Technology Leaders: Inspiring Women of DevOps
DevOps engineering is a relatively new career focused on building bridges between the developmental and operational sides of software development. But what does it take to become a DevOps engineer? What kind of work environment do they operate in? And is it a promising career for women in tech? View the most recent episode of "ACM-W Celebrating Technology Leaders," with host Bushra Anjum, in which you will hear from women with successful DevOps careers and learn from their experiences working in DevOps and as women in the field.
TechBrief on The Data Trust Deficit
ACM TechBriefs is a series of short technical bulletins by ACM’s Technology Policy Council that present scientifically-grounded perspectives on the impact of specific developments or applications of technology. Designed to complement ACM’s activities in the policy arena, the primary goal is to inform rather than advocate for specific policies. The new edition is focused on a key challenge: that the full potential of data-driven systems cannot be realized without better understanding the roots of the distrust they can engender. Importantly, the TechBrief dispels the popular misconception that a lack of trust in data systems is a result of poor data literacy among the public.
HotTopic Panel on Web Accessibility for All
ACM's US Technology Policy Committee (USTPC) hosted a HotTopics webinar session, "With Liberty and Web Accessibility for All: Getting the DOJ’s Upcoming Rulemaking Right"—now available on demand. The panel of ACM experts discussed what the new rules should look like, whether they can be crafted to well serve both user and business interests, what assistive technologies must they enable, if the new rules fully meet the needs of the one in four Americans affected by some form of disability, and how accessible websites should be designed to conform with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
TPC Releases Principles for Generative AI Technologies
In response to major advances in generative AI technologies—as well as the significant questions these technologies pose in areas including intellectual property, the future of work, and even human safety—ACM's global Technology Policy Council (TPC) has issued "Principles for the Development, Deployment, and Use of Generative AI Technologies." Drawing on the deep technical expertise of computer scientists in the United States and Europe, the TPC statement outlines eight principles intended to foster fair, accurate, and beneficial decision-making concerning generative and all other AI technologies.
Featured ACM ByteCast
ACM ByteCast is ACM's series of podcast interviews with researchers, practitioners, and innovators who are at the intersection of computing research and practice. In this episode of ACM ByteCast, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast—hosts Sabrina Hsueh and Adela Grando welcome Mor Peleg, Professor of Information Systems at the University of Haifa and Founding Director and Head of its Data Science Research Center. Peleg shares how she arrived at the intersection of information systems and medicine, talks about her recent project, MobiGuide, and more.
Meet Margo Seltzer
Margo Seltzer is the Canada 150 Research Chair and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She was recently named the 2023-2024 ACM Athena Lecturer. In her interview, Seltzer discusses her work on Berkeley DB and the challenges she faced in development, how machine learning is improving systems, and the ways her teaching style has changed over the years.
ACM Opens First 50 Years Backfile
ACM has opened the articles published during the first 50 years of its publishing program, from 1951 through the end of 2000, These articles are now open and freely available to view and download via the ACM Digital Library. ACM’s first 50 years backfile contains more than 117,500 articles on a wide range of computing topics. In addition to articles published between 1951 and 2000, ACM has also opened related and supplemental materials including data sets, software, slides, audio recordings, and videos.
Meet Michael E. Caspersen
Michael E. Caspersen is the Managing Director of It-vest, an information technology educational and scientific network which connects three universities in western Denmark, and is Honorary Professor at Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University. He is also the recipient of the 2022 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. In his interview, he discusses starting It-vest, changes in the teaching of programming throughout his career, his work with work with ACM Europe, Informatics Europe, and the Informatics for All coalition, and more.
ACM SIG Elections - Voting
Voting for the 2023 SIG Elections has concluded.
The election results have been published here.
KDD 2023, August 6 - 10
The SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining brings together researchers and practitioners from data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, large-scale data analytics, and big data. Workshops and tutorials will include “Graph Learning Benchmarks,” “Decision Intelligence and Analytics for Online Marketplaces,” “Trustworthy Transfer Learning: Transferability and Trustworthiness,” and more. Keynote speakers will be Ed Chi (Google DeepMind), Eric Horvitz (Microsoft), and Mihaela van der Schaar (University of Cambridge). The conference will be held in Long Beach, California, USA.
SIGGRAPH 2023, August 6 - 10
Celebrating its 50th year as the premier conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques, the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques will again include both on-demand presentations and scheduled sessions celebrating advancements in production and animation, research and education, arts and design, gaming, computer graphics, digital art, animation, visual effects, machine learning, artificial intelligence, immersive and mixed realities, scientific visualization, and more. Keynote speakers will be Kathryn Kleiman (American University) and Jensen Huang (Founder, Nvidia). This event will be held in Los Angeles, California, USA.
SIGGRAPH: Seminal Graphics Papers, Volume 2
In recognition of its 50th year as the premier conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques, the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) will be publishing Seminal Graphics Papers, Volume 2. This collection of 89 papers celebrates SIGGRAPH’s origins and continued success as a technical and professional society, and typifies the ground-breaking research that has been the conference’s hallmark since 1974. All articles will be open in the DL with a print-on-demand version available for purchase as well.
A Computational Inflection for Scientific Discovery
In this article from the August 2023 issue of Communications of the ACM, Tom Hope, et al. propose that we stand at the foot of a significant inflection in the trajectory of scientific discovery. As society continues its digital transformation, so does humankind's collective scientific knowledge and discourse. The transition has led to the creation of a tremendous amount of information, opening exciting opportunities for computational systems that harness it. In parallel, we are witnessing remarkable advances in artificial intelligence, including large language models capable of learning powerful representations from unstructured text. The confluence of societal and computational trends suggests that computer science is poised to ignite a revolution in the scientific process itself.
More Than Just Algorithms
Dramatic advances in the ability to gather, store, and process data have led to the rapid growth of data science and its mushrooming impact on nearly all aspects of the economy and society. Data science has also had a huge effect on academic disciplines with new research agendas, new degrees, and organizational entities. Recognizing the complexity and impact of the field, Alfred Spector, Peter Norvig, Chris Wiggins, and Jeannette Wing have completed a new textbook on data science, Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, Opportunities, published in October 2022. With deep and diverse experience in both research and practice, across academia, government, and industry, the authors present a holistic view of what is needed to apply data science well.
OS Scheduling
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, "OS Scheduling," Kostis Kaffes, incoming Assistant Professor at Columbia University and software engineer at SystemsResearch@Google, offers his take on better scheduling policies for modern computing systems focusing on a trio of papers. The first paper challenges the putative tradeoff between low latency and high utilization. The second enables the creation of arbitrary scheduling policies by factoring apart the creation and manipulation of policy. And the final selection addresses the choice of policy on an application-by-application basis.
Become an Ambassador for ACM
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Bringing You the World’s Computing Literature
The most comprehensive collection of full-text articles and bibliographic records covering computing and information technology includes the complete collection of ACM's publications.
Lifelong Learning
ACM offers lifelong learning resources including online books and courses from Skillsoft, TechTalks on the hottest topics in computing and IT, and more.
ACM Updates Code of Ethics
ACM recently updated its Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. The revised Code of Ethics addresses the significant advances in computing technology since the 1992 version, as well as the growing pervasiveness of computing in all aspects of society. To promote the Code throughout the computing community, ACM created a booklet, which includes the Code, case studies that illustrate how the Code can be applied to situations that arise in everyday practice and suggestions on how the Code can be used in educational settings and in companies and organizations. Download a PDF of the ACM Code booklet.