ACM MemberNet - December 19, 2019

Welcome to the December 2019 edition of ACM MemberNet, bringing you the world of ACM and beyond. Explore the many facets of ACM with our newsletter of member activities and events. Read past issues of MemberNet online at https://www.acm.org/membership/acm-membernet-archive.

Read coverage of ACM in the news media.

December 19, 2019

TOP STORIES

AWARDS

MEMBER RECOGNITION

SIG AWARDS

CONFERENCES AND EVENTS

PUBLIC POLICY

MEMBER PROGRAMS

LEARNING CENTER

ACM CAREER & JOB CENTER

STUDENT NEWS

DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS PROGRAM

CHAPTERS NEWS

ACM-W NEWS

PUBLICATIONS NEWS

TOP STORIES

ACM Names 2019 Fellows

ACM has named 58 members ACM Fellows for significant contributions in areas including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, combating cybercrime, quantum computing and wireless networking. The accomplishments of the 2019 ACM Fellows underpin the technologies that define the digital age and greatly impact our professional and personal lives. ACM Fellows comprise an elite group that represents less than 1% of the Association’s global membership.

"Computing technology has had a tremendous impact in shaping how we live and work today,” said ACM President Cherri M. Pancake in announcing the 2019 ACM Fellows. “All of the technologies that directly or indirectly influence us are the result of countless hours of collaborative and/or individual work, as well as creative inspiration and, at times, informed risk-taking. Each year, we look forward to welcoming some of the most outstanding individuals as Fellows. The ACM Fellows program is a cornerstone of our overall recognition effort. In highlighting the accomplishments of the ACM Fellows, we hope to give credit where it is due, while also educating the public about the extraordinary array of areas in which computing professionals work."

Underscoring ACM’s global reach, the 2019 Fellows hail from universities, companies and research centers in Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States.

The contributions of the 2019 Fellows run the gamut of the many sub-disciplines of the computing field?including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, computer graphics, computational biology, data science, security and privacy, software engineering, quantum computing, and web science, to name a few.

ACM will formally recognize its 2019 Fellows at the annual Awards Banquet, to be held in San Francisco on June 20, 2020. Additional information about the 2019 ACM Fellows, as well as previously named ACM Fellows, is available through the ACM Fellows site.

Read the ACM news release.

ACM Digital Library to Transition to New Platform January 1

ACM will cut over to the new ACM Digital Library platform on January 1, 2020.

The ACM DL includes ACM's complete database of articles and artifacts published during the past 70 years. The ACM DL also includes fully integrated bibliographic data for nearly all computing literature, making it an extremely important discovery tool for the computing community.

For the past several months we have been running a beta site of the new platform alongside the existing DL. Throughout the process of developing the new ACM DL, which is built on Atypon's Literatum platform, we have solicited and acted on feedback from the community. From the initial design concepts through to the features and functionality of today, we have received much valuable feedback that has been very helpful in shaping the features and overall experience of the platform. We plan to continue to collect feedback from the community as we set the direction moving forward.

During the past several weeks, we have explored many of the features and functionality of the new ACM DL in a series of informative emails and tweets. After the cutover to the new platform, we plan to continue this well-received series, archived at https://libraries.acm.org/training-resources/new-dl-features. If you would like to be a part of this conversation, please follow @ACMDL or contact us at [email protected].

We invite you to explore https://DLnext.acm.org on your desktop, tablet and mobile devices and discover some of the many enhancements in usability and functionality. To tell us what you think, please use the feedback button on the DLNext beta site, or contact us via email at [email protected], or via Twitter @ACMDL.

ACM Announces New Members of Future of Computing Academy

The ACM Future of Computing Academy (FCA), created in 2016, brings together talented young professionals from a broad range of computing subdisciplines and institutions—academia, research labs, established companies, and startups—who want to perform valuable services for the community while expanding their professional networks and leadership experience. FCA members identify and implement pilot projects that address challenging issues facing our organization and the computing field in general. They work closely with ACM leadership, bringing in new ideas and perspectives and helping to integrate successful pilots—such as “crash courses” in AI and cross-disciplinary podcasts—into ACM's institutional practices.

FCA members are selected biennially through a highly competitive process similar to the nomination process for ACM awards. This past summer, hundreds of applications arrived from around the globe, resulting in 36 new members from 17 countries. The group is diverse not only in gender and geography but also in the organizations and disciplinary interests represented.

It is hoped that programs like ACM FCA will attract a more diverse membership to the organization while creating a pipeline of future leaders. Learn more about the FCA and its activities and meet the new members.

Read ACM President Cherri Pancake’s letter in December Communications of the ACM about FCA and more ways in which ACM is engaging with the next generation of computer scientists.

2020 ACM General Election Slate

In accordance with the Constitution and Bylaws of the ACM, the Nominating Committee hereby submits the following slate of nominees for ACM's officers. In addition to the officers of the ACM, five Members at Large will be elected.

The Constitution and Bylaws provide that candidates for elected offices of the ACM may also be nominated by petition of one percent of the Members who as of 1 November 2019 are eligible to vote for the nominee. Such petitions must be accompanied by a written declaration that the nominee is willing to stand for election. The number of Member signatures required for the offices of President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer and Members at Large, is 739.

The Bylaws provide that such petitions must reach the Elections Committee before 31 January 2020. Original petitions for ACM offices are to be submitted to the ACM Elections Committee, c/o Pat Ryan, COO, ACM Headquarters, 1601 Broadway, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10019, USA, by 31 January. Duplicate copies of the petitions should also be sent to the Chair of the Elections Committee, Gerry Segal, c/o ACM Headquarters. Statements and biographical sketches of all candidates will appear in the May 2020 issue of Communications of the ACM.

View the candidate slate.

AWARDS

ACM Award Nomination Submission Procedures

Each year, ACM recognizes technical and professional achievements within the computing and information technology community through its celebrated Awards Program. ACM welcomes nominations for candidates whose work exemplifies the best and most influential contributions to our community, and society at large. ACM's award committees evaluate the contributions of candidates for various awards that span a spectrum of professional and technological accomplishments. For awards presented at the annual June banquet, the deadline for nominations is January 15, 2020.

Please take a moment to consider those individuals in your community who may be suitable for nomination. Refer to the award nominations page for nomination guidelines and the complete listing of Award Subcommittee Chairs and Members.

Communications of the ACM Article on Award Nominations by ACM President Cherri Pancake

In her article for the August issue of CACM, Dispelling Common Myths about ACM Awards and Honors, ACM President Cherri Pancake shares her insights on what elements make nominations effective. Pancake is a former ACM Awards Committee Chair.

MEMBER RECOGNITION

Call for ACM Senior Member Nominations

The Senior Member advanced grade of membership recognizes ACM members with at least 10 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous ACM Professional membership. Nominations are accepted on a quarterly basis. The deadline for nominations is March 3, 2020.

SIG AWARDS

ACM SIG Awards Recognize Achievements in Diverse Fields

ACM's Special Interest Groups (SIGs) regularly cite outstanding individuals for their contributions in more than 35 distinct technological fields. Some awards presented (or to be presented) at recent conferences:

CONFERENCES AND EVENTS

GROUP 2020, January 6 to 8, Sanibel Island, Florida

The ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work is a premier venue for research on computer-supported cooperative work, human-computer interaction, computer-supported collaborative learning and socio-technical studies. The conference integrates work in social science, computer science, engineering, design, values, and other diverse topics related to group work. Lora Aroyo, a computer science professor who is a visiting faculty at Google, President of the User Modeling Society, and Chief Scientist at Tagasauris, will keynote.

POPL 2020, January 19 to 25, New Orleans, Louisiana

The ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages is a forum for the discussion of all aspects of programming languages and programming systems. Co-hosted conferences, workshops and symposia will cover topics such as Certified Programs and Proofs; Programming Languages for Quantum Computing; and Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. Delivering keynotes will be Casper Bach Poulsen (Delft University of Technology), Zhenjiang Hu (Peking University), Xinyu Feng (Nanjing University), Chantal Keller (LRI, Université Paris-Sud) and Kathrin Stark (Saarland University).

ACM FAT* 2020, January 27 to 30, Barcelona, Spain

The ACM FAT* Conference brings together researchers and practitioners interested in fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems. Scheduled keynote speakers are Ayanna Howard (Georgia Institute of Technology), Yochai Benkler (Harvard University) and Nani Jansen Reventlow (Digital Freedom Fund, Columbia Law School).

AIES 2020, February 7 to 8, New York, New York

The AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society features a multidisciplinary approach to ethical concerns and challenges in AI regarding issues such as privacy, safety and security, surveillance, inequality, data handling and bias, personal agency, power relations, effective modes of regulation, accountability, sanctions, and workforce displacement.

PUBLIC POLICY

ACM Policy Statement Undergirds Global Call for Governments to Embrace Robust Encryption

By Adam Eisgrau, ACM Director of Global Policy and Public Affairs

Earlier this month, on the eve of a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled Encryption and Lawful Access: Evaluating Benefits and Risks to Public Safety and Privacy, a detailed letter signed by more than 100 organizations and individual experts supporting strong encryption was delivered to the Committee. ACM's US Technology Policy Committee (USTPC) was one of the signatories. Furthermore, USTPC's 2018 Statement on Mandatory Engineered Law Enforcement Access to Information Infrastructure and Devices was cited in support of the letter's most fundamental point:

Proponents of exceptional access have argued that it is possible to build backdoors into encrypted consumer products that somehow let "good actors" gain surreptitious access to encrypted communications, while simultaneously stopping "bad actors" from intercepting those same communications.

This technology does not exist. To the contrary, technology companies could not give governments backdoor access to encrypted communications without also weakening the security of critical infrastructure, and the devices and services upon which the national security and intelligence communities themselves rely.

The letter—addressed to the law enforcement and intelligence branch chiefs of the US, UK and Australian governments—calls upon them to follow the lead of James Baker, the FBI's former General Counsel, in reversing course and embracing strong encryption systems. It was prompted by a highly-publicized letter by those governments in October urging Facebook to abandon its announced plan to deploy end-to-end encryption across its platforms. At that time, USTPC joined with dozens of other organizations in signing a letter urging Facebook to resist that pressure.

Recent efforts to outlaw or weaken strong encryption on both sides of the Atlantic (and globally with recent legislative action in Australia) are only the latest in what has been a hotly contested debate since the 1970s, pitting the privacy rights of individuals against law enforce-ment's responsibility to protect the public from criminal and terrorist elements.

During the Senate hearing, however, the message from Committee members to expert witnesses from Facebook and Apple was clear. Committee Chair Lindsey Graham urged the witnesses to redesign their services and devices to permit law enforcement access to otherwise encrypted communications, stating, "My advice to you is to get on with it, because this time next year, if we haven't found a way that you can live with, we will impose our will on you."

MEMBER PROGRAMS

Become an Ambassador for ACM—You Could Be a Grand Prize Winner!

The Ambassadors for ACM program rewards ACM members like you for encouraging new members to join. Your first-hand experience with ACM's valuable career development and continuous learning programs makes you a perfect envoy to share your ACM experiences with prospective members. The Ambassadors for ACM program offers opportunities for you to earn new prizes, rewards and bonus gifts with each referral. Submit the ACM Referral Form, and your referrals can join ACM at a special discount rate. Our members are our greatest asset. Your support of ACM is critical to our continuing efforts to advance computing as a science and a profession. Please consider becoming an Ambassador for ACM.

FreshBooks is the Number 1 accounting software in the cloud, designed exclusively for freelancers and growing service-based business owners. Automate invoicing, organize expenses, track time and accept credit cards online with just a few clicks. FreshBooks helps you grow your business, gets you paid 2x faster and keeps you and your team organized, efficient and collaborative. Through our partnership with FreshBooks, ACM members can now get two months free.

ACM Academic Membership Option

The ACM Academic Department Membership option allows universities and colleges to provide ACM Professional Membership to their faculty at a greatly reduced collective cost. ACM offers a membership for academic department faculty at the cost of $49 per person, more than half off the standard ACM professional membership fee of $99 per year. Through this program, each faculty member will receive all the benefits of individual professional ACM membership, including Communications of the ACM, member rates to ACM Special Interest Group conferences, member subscription rates to ACM journals, and much more. To learn more, visit the ACM Academic Department Membership page or contact Cindy Ryan.

ACM and SocialCoder Team Up for Positive Impact through Computing

You can use your technical skills for social good and offer volunteer support on software development projects to organizations who could not otherwise afford it. SocialCoder connects volunteer programmers/software developers with registered charities and helps match them to suitable projects based on their skills, experience, and the causes they care about. Learn more about ACM's partnership with SocialCoder, and how you can get involved.

LEARNING CENTER

Watch December 16 TechTalk with PyTorch Author Adam Paszke

Register to watch the ACM TechTalk, PyTorch: A Modern Library for Machine Learning, presented on December 16 by Adam Paszke, Co-Author and Maintainer of PyTorch, an open source Python library. Learn more about this topic by visiting ACM's Discourse page.

Visit the TechTalks Archive for our full archive of past TechTalks.

Watch January 7 TechTalk with Software Engineer Steve McConnell

Register to watch the next ACM TechTalk, Seven Unbreakable Rules of Software Leadership, to be presented on Tuesday, January 7, 2020 at 1 PM EST by Steve McConnell CEO and Chief Software Engineer, Construx Software. Leave your comments and questions with our speaker now and any time before the live event on ACM's Discourse page.

ACM CAREER & JOB CENTER

ACM Career & Job Center Connects You with Career Opportunities

Connecting with the right employers in computing can be a daunting task. Thankfully, the world's leading companies, colleges and universities come to the ACM Career & Job Center to find the best candidates. By creating an account on the ACM Career and Job Center, you'll gain access to a wide range of tools to help you find the perfect job:

  • Finding a Job - Use the job search tools to find a job that matches your search criteria.
  • Create and Manage Email Alerts - Stay on top of the latest job openings. Receive an email when new jobs match your search criteria.
  • Create/Post Resumes - Get noticed by employers. Create or upload a resume with our easy-to-use tools so employer can get in touch with you.
  • View Saved Jobs - Save jobs that interest you, add notes, share with friends, and track your applies to keep on top of your job search.

For any assistance with the ACM Career and Job Center, please contact ACM's Advertising Sales Manager, Ilia Rodriguez.

STUDENT NEWS

Apply Now for 2019-2020 ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize: Deadline January 12, 2020

The ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing recognizes talented high school students in computer science. Judges will be looking for submissions that demonstrate ingenuity, complexity, relevancy, originality, and a desire to further computer science as a discipline. The application period closes January 12, 2020. Apply here.

Young Researchers: Apply for 8th Heidelberg Laureate Forum, September 20-25, 2020: Deadline February 14, 2020

ACM encourages researchers and practitioners at all phases of their careers (undergrad, PhD or postdoc) to apply for the next Heidelberg Laureate Forum for a chance to personally interact with laureates of the most prestigious prizes in mathematics and computer science, including the ACM A.M. Turing Award and the ACM Prize in Computing. Applications must be submitted online at https://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/young-researchers/selection-process.html by February 14, 2020. You can also nominate a candidate (on the registration form, click on the "Register as a Nominator" button at the top; you will need to enter ACM’s organization code; please email [email protected] to request this number).

Upcoming ACM Student Research Competitions: Submission Deadlines

ACM Student Research Competitions (SRCs), sponsored by Microsoft Research, offer a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research at well-known ACM sponsored and co-sponsored conferences before a panel of judges and attendees. The most recent SRC winners presented at SC19. The next conferences accepting submissions are:

Learn more about competitions on the SRC submissions page and SRC guidelines for students.

ACM Scholarships for Women Computing Students to Attend Research Conferences

The ACM Community of Support for Women in Computing (ACM-W) provides support for women undergraduate or graduate students in computer science and related programs who wish to attend research conferences. This exposure to the computer science research world can encourage a student to continue on to the next level (Undergraduate to Graduate, Masters to Ph.D., Ph.D. to an industry or academic position). For application form, notification dates and more information, please visit the scholarships page.

Graduating Students Eligible for Special Transition Rate

ACM offers a special ACM Professional Membership for $49 USD (regularly $99) to help graduating students make the transition to professional careers, and take advantage of continuous learning opportunities, including free online books and courses and access to ACM's Career & Job Center. This one-year-only transition rate includes all the benefits of Professional Membership plus the option of purchasing a Digital Library subscription for $50. Recent graduates can access this special transition offer through ACM's convenient online renewal form, or by following the instructions on the paper renewal form. For more information, visit the Reasons to Transition to Professional Membership page.

DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS PROGRAM

About the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program

Book the speaker for your next event through the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program (DSP) and deliver compelling and insightful content to your audience. ACM will cover the cost of transportation for the speaker to travel to your event. Our program features renowned thought leaders in academia, industry and government speaking about the most important topics in the computing and IT world today. Our booking process is simple and convenient.
See ACM Distinguished Speakers in action on our flickr page.

Luca Muscariello is Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems in the Chief Architecture and Technology Office, where he works on research and development, as well as industrialization of information-centric networking technologies. A Senior Member of ACM, IEEE and SEE, he has published more than 60 papers in journals such as IEEE/ACM Transactions, Elsevier Science journals, and conference proceedings such as ACM SIGCOMM, ICN, ACM SIGMETRICS, and IEEE INFOCOM. He is leading two open source projects focusing on high performance implementation of ICN network and transport stacks.

For more information on Luca, please visit his DSP speaker information page.
Luca Muscariello's Digital Library author page

ACM, IEEE Computer Society Share Distinguished Speakers Programs

IEEE-CS and ACM are sharing their invited speaker programs, to further the dissemination of technical knowledge of computing fields that greatly benefit both memberships. IEEE-CS chapter volunteers can host a speaker from ACM's Distinguished Speakers Program (DSP), with access to top technology leaders and innovators from nearly every sector of the computing industry, by following the instructions on the DSP site. Make sure you identify yourself as an IEEE Computer Society Chapter.

IEEE-CS provides a popular offering of first-quality speakers serving its professional and student chapters. The Distinguished Visitors Program (DVP) owes its success to the many volunteers and staff members of the Computer Society who generously contribute their time and talent. Organizers of an ACM chapter, conference, or event can host a speaker from IEEE-CS's DVP by following the instructions on the DVP site. Make sure you identify yourself as an ACM chapter or event.

CHAPTERS NEWS

ACM Thanks Student Chapters for Participating in Hour of Code

The Hour of Code is a global movement designed to generate excitement in young people about programming and technology. Games, tutorials, and other events were organized during Computer Science Education Week around the world. ACM would like to congratulate all of the ACM Student Chapters that took part this year. View the complete list of chapters that participated.

Welcome New ACM Chapters

Chapters are the "local neighborhoods" of ACM. The regional ACM Professional, Student, ACM-W, and Special Interest Group (SIG) chapters around the globe involve members locally in competitions, seminars, lectures, workshops, and networking opportunities. ACM welcomes new chapters that were chartered November 12 to December 8, 2019:

ACM Student Chapters:

  • BGCTUB ACM Student Chapter, Begum Gulchemonara Trust University, Chattagram, Bangladesh
  • CSE Punjabi University ACM Student Chapter, Patiala, India
  • Humboldt State ACM Student Chapter, Arcata, California
  • IIT Bombay ACM SIGCHI Student Chapter, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India
  • Rollins College ACM Student Chapter, Winter Park, Florida
  • Sullamussalam Science College ACM Student Chapter, Malappuram, India
  • University of New Mexico ACM-W Student Chapter, Albuquerque

ACM-W NEWS

Join ACM-W's Membership Email List

Did you know that ACM-W offers a general email distribution list for its members? This ACMW-public list is a communication channel for disseminating general information about ACM-W, bulletins and upcoming events. To join the list: http://signup.acm.org/listserv_index.cfm?ln=ACM-W-PUBLIC. Also read the ACM-W Connections newsletter for updates on ACM-W programs: local celebrations, scholarships and awards, chapters, and more.

PUBLICATIONS NEWS

New ACM Journals Accepting Submissions

ACM Digital Threats: Research and Practice (DTRAP) targets the prevention, identification, mitigation, and elimination of digital threats, aiming to bridge the gap between academic research and industry practice. It is accepting submissions on extant digital threats, rather than laboratory models of potential threats.

ACM Transactions on Data Science (TDS) includes cross-disciplinary innovative research ideas, algorithms, systems, theory and applications on data science, including data cleaning, transformation, representation, integration, indexing, modeling, analysis, visualization, and interpretation while retaining privacy, fairness, provenance, transparency, and provision of social benefit, within the context of big data.

ACM Transactions on Internet of Things (TIOT) publishes novel research contributions and experience reports in several research domains whose synergy and interrelations enable the IoT vision. TIOT focuses on system designs, end-to-end architectures, and enabling technologies, and on publishing results and insights corroborated by a strong experimental component.

ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare (HEALTH) is a multi-disciplinary journal publishing papers that have scientific and technological results pertaining to how computing is improving healthcare.

Digital Government: Research and Practice (DGOV) is an interdisciplinary journal on the potential and impact of technology on governance innovations and its transformation of public institutions.

ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing (TQC) will publish original research papers and surveys on topics in quantum computing and quantum information science. Topics can include models of quantum computing, quantum algorithms and complexity, quantum computing architecture, principles and methods of fault-tolerant quantum computation, design automation for quantum computing, quantum programming languages and systems, and more.

ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization (TELO) publishes high quality original papers in all areas of evolutionary computation and related areas such as population-based methods, Bayesian optimization, or swarm intelligence.

ACM Queue Presents: "The Reliability of Enterprise Applications"

In his article for ACM Queue, Sanjay Sha, an SRE Manager at Google, explains the concept of enterprise reliability, a discipline that ensures applications will deliver the required business functionality in a consistent, predictable, and cost-effective manner without compromising core aspects such as availability, performance, and maintainability. Enterprises sometimes base their buying decisions only on the required business functionality and tend to overlook the application's overall reliability. While achieving a high level of reliability is a common goal of most enterprises, reliability engineering involving third-party applications can be a complex landscape.

Subscribe to Communications of the ACM

Subscribe to Communications of the ACM, the computing industry's most trusted source for news, analysis and insights! Non-members can use our online form and receive a new ACM membership with your 12-month subscription, or request a sample issue using our online free trial issue form.

Copyright © 2019, ACM, Inc.