Chapter Member Newsletter

ACM Chapter Member News | March 2022

Welcome to the March 2022 edition of the ACM Chapter Member News.

Chapters are the "local neighborhoods" of ACM. Our Professional and Student chapters worldwide serve as nodes of activity for ACM members and the computing community at large, offering seminars, lectures, and the opportunity to meet peers and experts in many fields of interest. With over 1000 active chapters worldwide, we would like to take the time now to connect with all of you and bring you a few ACM Highlights.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE:

• ACM Chapter News

• Chapter Spotlight

• Welcome to Our Newest Chapters

• Why join ACM?

 

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ACM Chapter News

It is that time of year again! The ACM Student Chapter Excellence Awards recognizes outstanding ACM student chapters. All student chapters in good standing are encouraged to apply for this award in one or more of the following five key areas:

• Chapter Activities
• Chapter Website
• Recruitment Program
• Community Service
• School Service

To be eligible, active chapters must have all required officers and at least 10 active chapter members listed on the Chapter Admin Interface. Each category has its own online application. To be considered for one or more of these awards, complete the applications found at: https://www.acm.org/chapters/student-chapter-excellence-awards by Thursday, March 24, 2022 at 11:59 pm EST.

Winning chapters in each of these categories will receive $500 and a "best of" icon to proudly display on their chapter's website. Also, these chapters will be recognized on the ACM website and in ACM MemberNet.

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ACM Chapter Spotlight

Cyprus ACM-W Chapter

Cyprus ACM-W Chapter launched the FeSTEM community platform (https://festem.network/) on International Day of Girls and Women in Science (February 11). While there's a growing representation of women in science, several structural, social, and institutional barriers still remain. FeSTEM network is an e-mentoring platform that aims to link Higher Education (HE) students in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) with experienced mentors in the field. The platform was developed as part of the FeSTEM project (https://festemproject.eu) that is co-funded by the Erasmus+ program and supported by the Cyprus ACM-W Chapter (https://acmwomencyprus.wordpress.com/).

Greece ACM SIGCHI Chapter

CHIGreece 2021, the 1st International Conference of the Greece ACM SIGCHI Chapter, was held virtually, November 25-27, 2021. The conference focused on "Connecting the Community," and the main goal was to identify, invite, and engage actors of the Greek research community and other stakeholders. The event featured plenary sessions with keynote speakers, panel discussions, papers presentations, exhibition and interactive experiences, and a track dedicated to young researchers, offering them the opportunity to explore and develop their research interests under the guidance of distinguished scholars. Additionally, there was a panel of experts exchanging on this year's topic of World Usability Day on "Design of our Online World: Trust, Ethics and Integrity." Finally, three distinguished keynote speakers honored ACM CHIGreece 2021 by delivering keynote speeches, each illustrating significant issues and prospective directions for the field:

Nuria Oliver from ELLIS Unit Alicante Foundation "Data Science to fight COVID-19"

Alan Dix from the University of Swansea "Digital thinking"

Nikolaos Avouris from the University of Patras "Teaching HCI for social good"

IKDD ACM Chapter

The fifth edition of ACM India Joint International Conference on Data Science and Management of Data (CODS-COMAD), the leading conference on data systems and sciences in India, was held in a virtual format from January 7-10, 2022 (https://cods-comad.in/). In keeping with the rich history of its predecessors, IKDD ACM Chapter CODS and COMAD, this year saw seven keynotes on contemporary topics like the future of software with AI, context in search, interpretable Machine Learning, and multi-linguality for NLP, delivered by experts from across the world, and from academia and industry. Applied Data Sciences was a new track introduced this year, and this, along with the Research track, saw 21 full papers and 12 short papers presented from among 136 submissions. Diversity and Inclusion was a highlight of this year, with the conference featuring panel discussions and roundtables on promoting diverse and inclusive data science and mentoring sessions. They also had a record 12 tutorials on cutting-edge topics of data quality, green computing for big data, and responsible AI, with a special day set aside for it. The virtual format allowed over 550 attendees, including about 40 students supported through grants, to join various sessions of the conference, and also interact with young researchers and industry sponsors at virtual booths. The IKDD ACM Chapter would like to thank the volunteers and sponsors for this successful event, and they look forward to active participation from the IKDD community in future editions of the conference.

Kuwait University ACM Student Chapter

On Saturday, February 12, the Kuwait University ACM Student Chapter organized a Hackathon at one of Kuwait's largest and most popular outdoor parks, Al-Shaheed Park. This was one of the first offline events that they organized after the pandemic, and the necessity to follow health protocols added an extra layer of difficulty, but nevertheless they were very excited to meet the diverse group of participants. The opening ceremony started at 9:00 AM and the event lasted until the closing ceremony at 8:00 PM, with the winners announcement and prize award ceremony shortly after. The general theme of the hackathon was freelancing, where teams were given projects in freelancing scenarios. The chapter is proud that the organizing of the Hackathon went extremely well.

Chicago ACM Chapter

The Chicago ACM Chapter presented a webinar on Quantum Computing with Brent VanDevender of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (U.S. Dept. of Energy) on February 16, 2022. Mr. VanDevender gave the 169 attendees an in-depth look at the qubit and how it applies to Quantum Computers. Within their audience, 42% came from the Chicago ACM Chapter, with others from ACM chapters including the DC and Youngstown Ohio, IEEE-Chicago, and new members to their meetup group from across the U.S and Canada. After the talk, over 50 attendees stayed for an open discussion where the Chicago ACM Chapter executive committee and ACM Local Program representative, Andrew Conklin, addressed questions about their group, approach to presentations, and how to participate. For more information on the Chicago ACM Chapter and their past and future meetings/webinars, please visit http://chicagoacm.org and their YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ0zlFJjqo602cuZ207NGnQ.

FUNAAB ACM Student Chapter

FUNAAB ACM Student Chapter from Nigeria held a virtual roundtable discussion meeting on February 18th on Twitter on the topic of "Demystifying PhD actualization in record time." Speakers included University lecturers from diverse research domains with graduate student attendees. The event was conceptualized as a Town & Gown roundtable where university lecturers could be engaged by graduate students on how to achieve graduate degrees in record time. This was premised on the various factors that have attributed to the undue delays experienced by graduate students before graduation. Factors included unavailability of major supervisors to attend to Thesis or Dissertation drafts, incessant industrial actions by university teachers, etc. The roundtable had over 30 graduate students in attendance and three university teachers to answer questions.

In the end, it was agreed that postgraduate studies should not be the icing on the cake, hence, scholars must exhibit dogged determination notwithstanding challenges. Participating students were from diverse research domains including non-STEM disciplines.

AISSMS IOIT ACM Student Chapter

AISSMS IOIT ACM Student Chapter from India conducted a workshop on Augmented Reality from January 17-21, 2022. The workshop was conducted online on Cisco WebEx as a platform for communication. The event was led by their keynote Speaker Priyanshu Bhattacharjee, Co-founder of 'Antern' a technology-related startup.

The workshop had a wonderful turnout with 130+ attendees. Each day had a different focus:

Day 1 - Introduction to AR, VR and XR

Day 2 - Introduction to Unity and Vuforia SDK

Day 3 - Developing an AR application using Vuforia

Day 4 - Building AR filters for Instagram

Day 5 - Project

It was a very interactive workshop full of knowledge and excitement about the new growing technology. All the goals and expectations set for the event were successfully met.

Islamabad ACM Chapter

Islamabad ACM Chapter in Pakistan successfully organized the 2021 ICPC Asia Topi (GIK) Online Preliminary Programming Contest on January 25-26, 2022. The event was held over a period of two days, such that a mock round was conducted on January 25th and the actual contest was held on the 26th. The event was a success with around 143 teams, 429 contestants, from 17 different universities across Pakistan participating in the contest. The event was inaugurated with a tech talk "End to End Machine Learning: Prototype to Production" by Engr. Suleman Kazi, Software Engineer at Google.

Universidad del Norte ACM Student Chapter

In an effort to increase chapter membership, the Universidad del Norte ACM Student Chapter in Colombia held an event called the 'Feria Bienestar Uninorte.' The event was live at the university and attended by more than 40 students from the engineering and data science departments. They carried out logical and creative activities such as a competition computer science knowledge, a complex algorithm activity, and a fun competition playing the towers of Hanoi. The event resulted in many students registering as new members of the chapter.

Silicon Valley ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter

To increase interest and involvement in computer graphics and interactive techniques among women, the Silicon Valley ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter presented 'Learning to Predict High Frequency Signals via Low Frequency Embeddings' on February 8, 2022.

Existing machine learning models still struggle to predict high-frequency details present in data due to regularization, a technique necessary to avoid overfitting. Even though various approaches may be used to re-introduce high-frequency detail, it typically does not match the training data and is often not time coherent. Hence, a general strategy is proposed whereby high-frequency information is procedurally embedded into low-frequency data so that when the latter is smoothed by the network, the former still retains its high-frequency detail.

Jane Wu, Stanford University researcher and NVIDIA Simulation Technology software engineer, discussed the specific application of predicting cloth geometry and dynamics, demonstrating the efficacy of learning perturbations embedded in low-frequency geometric structures for the specific application of virtual cloth. Methods for predicting high-frequency geometric details via low-frequency embeddings for the application of cloth capture were also highlighted.

ACM congratulations all the chapters for organizing these successful events.

If your chapter would like to be featured in the chapter spotlight, please email [email protected] with a description of your recent event.

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Welcome to Our Newest Chapters

• AITR ACM-W Student Chapter - Indore, India (Student)
• Bandar Seri Begawan ACM Chapter - Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam (Professional)
• BBDITM ACM Student Chapter - Lucknow, India (Student)
• BIT Deoghar ACM Student Chapter - Deoghar, India (Student)
• BMSCE ACM Student Chapter - Bengaluru, India (Student)
• Coastal Carolina University ACM Student Chapter - Conway, SC (Student)
• CUST ACM Student Chapter - Islamabad, Pakistan (Student)
• GEU ACM-W Student Chapter - Dehradun, India (Student)
• HTU ACM Student Chapter - Amman, Jordan (Student)
• ITU ACM-W Student Chapter - Istanbul, Turkey (Student)
• JSPM RSCOE ACM Student Chapter - Pune, India (Student)
• Kathmandu ACM Chapter - Kathmandu, Nepal (Professional)
• MUJ ACM-W Student Chapter - Jaipur, India (Student)
• Nederland ACM SIGCHI Chapter - Amsterdam, Netherlands (Professional)
• Oklahoma City University ACM Student Chapter - Oklahoma City, OK (Student)
• Port Moresby ACM Chapter - Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea (Professional)
• PSU-H ACM-W Student Chapter - Middletown, PA (Student)
• Riverside City College ACM Student Chapter - Riverside, CA (Student)
• Sathyabama Institute ACM Student Chapter - Chennai, India (Student)
• Sathyabama Institute ACM-W Student Chapter - Chennai, India (Student)
• Southwestern College ACM Student Chapter - Winfield, KS (Student)
• Tbilisi ACM Chapter - Tbilis, Georgia (Professional)
• UHCL ACM Student Chapter - Houston, TX (Student)
• Ulaanbaatar ACM Chapter - Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (Professional)
• URosario ACM Student Chapter - Bogotá D.C., Colombia (Student)
• VEC ACM Student Chapter - CHENNAI, India (Student)
• Vientiane ACM Chapter - Vientiane, People's Dem. Republic of Lao (Professional)
• Western Colorado University ACM Student Chapter - Gunnison, CO (Student)
• Western Colorado University ACM-W Student Chapter - Gunnison, CO (Student)

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Why join ACM?

Not an ACM Member yet? Whether you are a student or a professional, ACM has great benefits to offer you. Read all about ACM's many benefits and membership options.

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Chapter and Chapter Member Benefits

Be sure to take advantage of the benefits ACM Chapters and ACM Chapter Members receive.

Read up on Professional Chapter Benefits and Resources, Professional Chapter Member Benefits,  Student Chapter Benefits and Resources, and Student Chapter Member Benefits.