ACM MemberNet - Spring 2025

May 15, 2025

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton Receive the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award

2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton

ACM has named Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton as recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. Barto and Sutton introduced the main ideas, constructed the mathematical foundations, and developed important algorithms for reinforcement learning—one of the most important approaches for creating intelligent systems. Barto is Professor Emeritus of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Sutton is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alberta, a Research Scientist at Keen Technologies, and a Fellow at Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute). Read the press release.

Torsten Hoefler Receives the 2024 ACM Prize in Computing

2024 ACM Prize in Computing recipient Torsten Hoefler

ACM has named Torsten Hoefler the recipient of the 2024 ACM Prize in Computing for fundamental contributions to high-performance computing and the ongoing AI revolution. Hoefler developed many of the core capabilities of modern supercomputers and defined key aspects of the algorithms for distributing AI models on them. Hoefler is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), where he serves as Director of the Scalable Parallel Computing Laboratory. He is also the Chief Architect for AI and Machine Learning at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS). Hoefler received a Diplom Informatik (Master of Computer Science) from Chemnitz University of Technology and a PhD in Computer Science from Indiana University. Read the press release.

Rachid Guerraoui Receives Inaugural Luiz André Barroso Award

Luiz André Barroso Award recipient Rachid Guerraoui

ACM has named Rachid Guerraoui the recipient of the inaugural ACM Luiz André Barroso Award for theoretical and applied contributions to distributed computing and impactful work on promoting computer science in Africa. He has made groundbreaking contributions that have shaped the landscape of distributed computing, provided new insights into managing transactions in concurrent environments, and has provided tools and frameworks for understanding and optimizing transaction performance. Guerraoui is a Professor in the School of Computer and Communications Sciences at EPFL, where he is also Director of the Distributed Computing Laboratory. The award was established to recognize researchers from historically underrepresented communities who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Read the press release.

Jason Cong Receives ACM Thacker Breakthrough Award

ACM Thacker Breakthrough Award recipient Jason Cong

ACM has named Jason Cong, the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at the University of California, Los Angeles, is 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. Read the news release.

Cordelia Schmid Named 2025-2026 Athena Lecturer

2025-2026 Athena Lecturer Cordelia Schmid

ACM has named Cordelia Schmid, Research Director at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria), and Google Research Scientist, as the 2025-2026 ACM Athena Lecturer. Schmid is recognized for outstanding contributions to computer vision in image retrieval, object recognition and video understanding. Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Read the news release.

ACM PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

ACM Fellows Inducted Into US National Academy of Sciences

Four ACM Fellows have been inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. Congratulations to Rodney A. Brooks (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Ravindran Kannan (University of California, Berkeley), Lydia E. Kavraki (Rice University), and Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio, (Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute). The National Academy of Sciences recognizes achievement in science and provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations. Read more here.

Moshe Vardi Receives 2025 IEEE CS Computer Pioneer Award in Honor of the Women of ENIAC

ACM Fellow Moshe Y. Vardi, University Professor and the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering and Professor of Computer Science in the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing at Rice University, is one of the two recipients of the IEEE Computer Society’s (CS) prestigious 2025 Computer Pioneer Award in Honor of the Women of ENIAC. Among his many other honors are the ACM Presidential Award, the Kanellakis Award, the Newell Award, the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award, and the Gödel Prize. Read more here.

Turing Award Laureates Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun Receive Queen Elizabeth Prize

ACM A. M. Turing Award laureates Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun were among those awarded the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, along with ACM Fellow Fei-Fei Li, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Bill Dally, Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President at Nvidia. The annual prize, awarded to engineers whose innovations have benefited humanity on a global scale, was presented in recognition of contributions to the development of modern machine learning (ML). Hinton, Bengio, and LeCun were recognized for groundbreaking research into the artificial neural networks that have become the dominant model for ML. Read more here.

William Sanders Named RIT's President

ACM Fellow William H. Sanders has been named the next president of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and was praised for his research credentials, innovation in education, success in global partnerships and entrepreneurship, and strong student engagement. Currently the Dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering, Sanders will assume his new post on July 1. Sanders’ research interests include computing systems with a focus on critical infrastructures. He has directed work as part of national efforts to make the US power grid smart and resilient. Read more here.

AWARDS & MEMBER RECOGNITION

ACM Honors Those Who Shape Technology’s Future

ACM announced the recipients of three prestigious technical awards:

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.
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.
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.

Read the news release.

Call for ACM Award Nominations

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 seeks your help in expanding and diversifying the nomination pool for our ACM Awards. Please take a moment to consider those people in your community who may be suitable for nomination. Refer to the award nominations page for links to individual award pages, where you will find nomination requirements, deadlines, and Award Subcommittee Members. Nominations for most awards are due December 15, 2025. Other deadlines: ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award, June 30, 2025; Senior Members, June 3, 2025; Distinguished Members, Aug 1, 2025; Fellows, Sept 7, 2025.

PUBLIC POLICY

Technology Policy Group Issues Brief for Expanding Scope of Laws to Address Tech Abuse

The ACM Technology Policy Council (TPC) announced the publication of “TechBrief: Technology Policy Can Curb Domestic Violence, Human Trafficking, and Crimes Against Children,” a brief which explains how intimate partner violence, human trafficking, and child exploitation are facilitated by computing technologies. The term “tech abuse” pertains to a wide variety of abuse in this context. ACM policy experts contend that tech abuse is being addressed inconsistently, and often separately, by law enforcement, government agencies, and civil society. Studies indicate that these technology-facilitated activities are on the rise worldwide. Read the news release.

USTPC Recommendations to White House AI Action Plan

The ACM US Technology Policy Committee (USTPC) submitted comprehensive recommendations to the White House's AI Action Plan. The response emphasizes AI accountability, technical governance, trustworthy design, global competitiveness, and the importance of education and workforce development. USTPC continues to be a critical voice advancing responsible AI policy and standards that prioritize transparency, equity, and national leadership in innovation.

Europe TPC Feedback on EDPB Guidelines on Pseudonymisation

ACM’s Europe Technology Policy Committee submitted feedback on the EDPB’s Guidelines 01/2025 on Pseudonymisation, emphasizing technical and policy gaps. Key recommendations include supporting SMEs, strengthening safeguards against re-identification, addressing AI-specific risks like unlearning and synthetic data, and ensuring the guidelines are scalable, cryptographically sound, and future-proof—especially in light of quantum computing. These comments aim to improve real-world applicability and resilience of EU data protections.

PUBLISHING NEWS

Call for Papers: CACM Practice Section

Communications of the ACM is promoting its Practice section to be co-equal with its long-standing Research section and is accepting submissions of lasting interest to computing practitioners. All those interested in submitting articles for inclusion in CACM’s new Practice section dedicated to enhancing practitioners’ understanding of computing and improving job performance can learn more here.

acmqueue: "From Function Frustrations to Framework Flexibility: Fixing Tool Calls With Indirection"

The principle of indirection can be applied to introduce a paradigm shift: replacing direct value manipulation with symbolic reasoning using named variables. The transformation of function calls into reusable and interpretable frameworks elevates tool calling into a neuro-symbolic reasoning framework. This approach unlocks new possibilities for structured interaction and dynamic AI systems. Read the full article here.

New ACM Books

Today’s Internet of Things (IoT) devices are bulky, expensive, require battery maintenance, and involve costly installation. In contrast, the interactive stickers introduced in Sustainable Interactive Wireless Stickers: From Materials to Devices to Applications are low maintenance, inexpensive, and easy to deploy. Focusing on power, form factor, and cost as system design parameters, Nivedita Arora describes stickers that have simple circuitry and can sustain themselves while wirelessly communicating and responding to various human Interactions.

Formal Verification of Just-in-Time Compilation by Aurèle Barrière outlines a methodology to develop formally verified Just-in-Time compilers. Most modern web browsers today use Just-in-Time compilation to speed up the execution of the JavaScript programs they execute. However, the techniques used in these compilers can be particularly complex. To bring formal verification to Just-in-Time compilation, the book identifies a set of specific verification challenges and presents novel solutions for each of them.

Calculated Imagery: A History of Computer Graphics in Hollywood Cinema by Mark J. P. Wolf is a comprehensive history of computer graphics in Hollywood cinema. As the first such work of its kind, it is an essential reference for anyone interested in the history of cinema, visual effects, or computer graphics, and the industries of which they are a part. Throughout the book, the histories of individuals, companies, films, and computer graphics techniques are explored in detail, as well as changes in the visual effects (VFX) industry itself over time.

Software obfuscation is used in cryptography to transform source code to make it unintelligible without altering what it computes. As a software security mechanism, it is essential that software obfuscation have a firm mathematical foundation. In Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Studied Assumptions, Aayush Jain uses the research which earned him the ACM Dissertation Award to establish the feasibility of mathematically rigorous software obfuscation from well-studied hardness conjectures.

Journals Welcome New Editor-in-Chiefs

ACM Transactions on Social Computing (TSC) welcomes new Co-Editors-in-Chief Xiaoming Fu (University of Göttingen, Germany) and James Evans (University of Chicago) for a term starting May 1, 2025.

ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) welcomes Yufei Tao as its new Editor-in-Chief for the term of March 1, 2025 to February 29, 2028. Tao is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS) welcomes Vaughn Betz as its new Editor-in-Chief for the term April 1, 2025 to March 30, 2028. Betz is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and a Distinguished Visiting Professor, Cerebras Systems.

ACM Open Update: ACM Full Transition to Open Access

From January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. As part of this transition, ACM is introducing two levels of access, Premium and Basic, to balance its mission of accessibility with the need to sustain publishing activities. More information on Digital Library Premium is available here.

SIG NEWS & AWARDS

2025 ACM SIG Elections

The following SIGs are holding elections until 3 June 2025 (16:00 UTC): SIGBED, SIGCSE, SIGKDD, SIGMIS, SIGMOBILE, SIGSAM, SIGEVO, SIGHPC, SIGIR, SIGMOD. Please use your ACM web account credentials to log into the voting site. Please note that the ACM web account must be associated with your active ACM/SIG member record. More information here.

Register for SIGGRAPH 2025

Registration for SIGGRAPH 2025, the premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, is now open! Are you curious about exploring breakthroughs, new techniques, and cutting-edge ideas in popular industry topics like Generative AI, pipeline tools and workflows, animation and simulation, graphics systems architecture, lighting and modeling, fabrication, and augmented reality? Find all of this and more at ACM SIGGRAPH’s annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, or online from 10–14 August 2025. Access early registration rates when you register on or before 30 May 2025. Plus, ACM members can register at a discounted rate. Register now.

2025 SIGCHI Awards

The ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) announced its 2025 awards. These awards recognize exceptional achievements across multiple categories including research excellence, practical impact, and contributions to society. This year introduces the inaugural SIGCHI Special Recognitions program—a pathway to discover and establish future permanent awards through community engagement. Learn more here.

Best Paper Awards Given at Recent ACM SIG Conferences

ACM's Special Interest Groups (SIGs) regularly cite outstanding individuals for their contributions in 37 distinct technological fields. Some awards presented (or to be presented) at conferences:

You can find them all here.

DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION

Celebrating Technology Leaders: Women Driving Innovation in Open Source

Here, host Bushra Anjum and a diverse panel of inspiring professionals—Carlisia Campos, Eriol Fox, Mary Grygleski, and Rizel Scarlett—explore their personal journeys from curious onlookers to code contributors, practical advice on how to get involved and meaningfully contribute, insights into what drives open-source communities, ideas for building inclusive spaces that welcome everyone, and more. View the panel here.

ACM-W Rising Star Award Recipient: Shin Hwei Tan

ACM-W would like to announce Shin Hwei Tan as this year’s recipient of the ACM-W Rising Star Award! The ACM-W Rising Star Award recognizes a woman whose early-career research has had a significant impact on the computing discipline. Tan is currently an Associate Professor at Concordia University, Montreal, in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering. Read her interview here.

CMD-IT/ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference

The CMD-IT/ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference is the premier venue to acknowledge, promote and celebrat e diversity in computing. The goal is to bring together undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers, and professionals in computing from all backgrounds and ethnicities to celebrate the diversity that exists in computing, connect with others with common backgrounds, engage with computing leaders, and be inspired by great presentations and conversations with leaders with common backgrounds. The conference is being held September 10 - 12, 2025 in Dallas Texas.

Words Matter

As part of ACM’s efforts to combat exclusion in the computing profession, ACM's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council has launched an effort to replace offensive or exclusionary terminology in the computing field. They have developed a list of computing terms to be avoided in professional writing and presentations and offer alternative language. The Council has recently expanded the list and invites the community to submit suggestions for consideration.

MEMBERSHIP

Featured Member Benefit: Discounts and Special Offers

ACM's Discounts and Special Offers Program is our way of saying "Thanks!" to our members by providing you with discounts on the goods and services you need, want and use. Save on insurance, software/hardware, careers and conferences, magazines, books and journals, travel, financial products, and general consumer products.

LEARNING PROGRAMS

ACM ByteCast Interviews

ACM ByteCast is a podcast series from ACM’s Practitioner Board in which hosts Rashmi Mohan, Bruke Kifle, Scott Hanselman, Sabrina Hsueh, and Harald Störrle interview researchers, practitioners, and innovators who are at the intersection of computing research and practice. In each monthly episode, guests will share their experiences, the lessons they’ve learned, and their own visions for the future of computing. Recent ByteCast interviews include:

Michael J. Freedman, Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and co-Founder and CTO of Timescale, shares what drew him to computer science, how he became interested in security and privacy, working on peer-to-peer systems before cloud computing became ubiquitous explains the roles of CTO and head engineer at a technology company, and more.
Peter Lee, President of Microsoft Research, reflects on his 40+ years in computer science from working on PDP-11s and Commodore Amigas to modern AI advancements. He highlights how modern technologies built on decades of research have become indispensable, the lack of ethics education in traditional CS curricula, and more.
Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO and Founder of Openwater, a technical executive and inventor in the fields of display, imaging, and computer hardware, discusses her work with Openwater, the role of patents in manufacturing, the advantages of the company’s open-source model, highlights some of their breakthroughs, future possibilities with open source, and more.
Travis S. Humble, Director of the Quantum Science Center (QSC), describes his journey into quantum computing, explains the difference between classical and quantum computing and why quantum computing is particularly well suited for scientific applications such as drug discovery and energy solutions, talks about Oak Ridge’s quantum computing resources and how researchers can access them, and more.
Darja Smite, Professor of Software Engineering at Blekinge Institute of Technology and a part-time research scientist at SINTEF ICT, shares some of her research findings on outsourcing and discusses the effect automation will have on outsourcing and profitability, discusses reasons why people stay or leave their jobs, the challenge of people from different cultures finding common ground, the impact of COVID on work practices, offers advice for people considering a career in IT, and more.
Chieko Asakawa, an IBM Fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, shares how becoming blind early in life led her to work in accessibility research. She talks about her IBM team’s work on the Home Page Reader, the first practical voice browser to provide effective internet access for blind and visually impaired computer users, as well as more recent work on the AI suitcase, a robot that helps visually impaired people walk around and navigate independently, and more.

Listen to ACM ByteCast interviews here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Featured TechTalks

ACM members and non-members alike are welcome to attend our popular series of free TechTalks by expert industry professionals, distinguished ACM award laureates, and visionary researchers from industry and academia. Recent TechTalks include:

If you're looking to build production-ready AI applications that can reason and retrieve external data for context-awareness, you'll need to master LangChain and LangGraph. In "What’s Different About LLM Apps," Mayo Oshin and Nuno Campos will describe how LLM apps are different—latency, unreliable inputs, unreliable outputs—and how LangChain and LangGraph help you deal with that.
Since the publication of Parnas’ “On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules,” there has been good advice on how to design software. However, most software is more difficult to change than it should be and that friction compounds over time. In "Empirical Software Design: When & Why," software engineering pioneer Kent Beck explores how to resolve the seemingly irresolvable tradeoff between short-term feature progress and long-term optionality.
As data continues to shape decision-making across industries, the ability to communicate insights effectively has never been more critical. In "Applying Cinematic Techniques to Data Storytelling" Angelica Lo Duca, a Researcher at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the National Research Council, Italy, introduces a novel approach to data storytelling inspired by the structure of films and novels.
The current climate in the industry has engineering leaders across the globe leading through massive change: team efficiency, location, budget constraints, and more. In "The Death of Work: Leading Effective Engineering Teams," Sarah Drasner, Senior Director of Engineering at Google, talks about anti-patterns, and positive support we can offer to help people do their best work, backed by data.

Find our entire archive of TechTalks here.

EDUCATION

ACM2Y Executive Board Nominations

Nominations are now open for the ACM2Y Executive Board. If you've been wanting to get involved in an ACM group and have an interest in two-year computing education programs (Associate Degree, Community College, Technical College), please self-nominate. The term is 2 years (July 1, 2025 - June 30, 2027). Nominations will be accepted until May 31, 2025. Learn more and nominate here.

ACM Education Board Generative AI Survey

The Taskforce of the ACM Education Board on Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Student Programming Assessment is conducting a survey for those who are using GenAI to teach programming in their classes. The survey should take only 10 - 15 minutes to complete and participation in the survey is voluntary. Any data collected via this survey will be treated confidentially. The survey can be taken here.

On Demand: “Landscape of Ethical and Societal Impacts of Generative AI in Education”

Generative AI is transforming the way we are accessing and using information particularly in educational settings. In “Landscape of Ethical and Societal Impacts of Generative AI in Education," hosts Joyce Nabende and Janice Mak and panelists Aarti Singh, Hironao Okahana, and Michael Madaio highlight recent developments in the Generative AI space for education and then delve into the societal and ethical implications of using Generative AI tools for education.

Call for Submissions: ACM EngageCSEdu

Did you know that the ACM Education Board has a special project that allows you to share outstanding instructional materials from your classes? EngageCSEdu publishes high-quality, engaging, classroom-tested Open Educational Resources (OERs) for computer science education. OERs published by ACM EngageCSEdu are included in the ACM Digital Library as part of the ACM Teaching Materials for Computing Collection.

STUDENT NEWS

Upcoming ACM Student Research Competitions: Submission Deadlines

ACM Student Research Competitions (SRCs) 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 were presented at ICSE 2025. The next conferences accepting submissions are:

SOSP 2025, October 13-16, 2025, deadline August 15, 2025
ASE 2025, November 16-20, 2025, deadline August 12, 2025
MODELS 2025, October 5-10-, 2025, deadline July 18, 2025
SPLASH 2025, October 12-18, 2025, deadline July 8 2025
ASSETS 2025, October 26-29, 2025, deadline June 25, 2025

CHAPTER NEWS

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. 52 Student and 11 Professional Chapters were started in Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, India, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Qatar, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the Unites States. ACM Welcomes New Chapters Chartered January 1 - May 6, 2025.

Submitting ACM Annual Report

ACM's fiscal year is coming to a close, which means the ACM Chapter Annual Reports are available to be completed. The report is for the fiscal year 2025 (July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025) and is due by August 31, 2025.

To complete the report online, you must log in with your unique chapter web account. Please note, your chapter web account is entirely separate from your personal web account and should be accessible to all officers. More information here. If you are unsure of your chapter web account or need to reset the password, please use this link. If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact us.

DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS PROGRAM

ACM Distinguished Speaker: Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Ricardo Baeza-Yates' areas of expertise are information retrieval, web search and data mining, data science and algorithms. He is currently a Professor at Northeastern University, Silicon Valley campus, since August 2017. He is also CTO of NTENT, a semantic search technology company based in California since June 2016. His lectures include "Big Data or Right Data? Opportunities and Challenges," "Distributed Web Search," "Ethics in AI: A Challenging Task," and more. For more information about Malossi, please visit his DSP speaker information page.

All speakers are available through ACM's ACM Distinguished Speaker Program.

Celebrate AAPI Heritage Month with ACM

Throughout May 2025, ACM will spotlight and celebrate influential leaders, researchers, and technology pioneers who continue to drive excellence in the computing field. Follow #AAPIHeritageMonth on our social media accounts on Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, and X. Learn more here.

ACM CAREER & JOB CENTER

The Ultimate Career Development Destination

Connecting with the right employers in computing can be a daunting task. The ACM Career & Job Center is a true career planning destination. Whether you are seeking Career Insights, Career Advice, or Career Coaching, ACM can help.

Read past issues of MemberNet online in our archive.

Is there a person, event, or issue you'd like to see covered? Please email [email protected].

ACM MemberNet - Spring 2025