Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Whether you are a student or an experienced engineering leader, a robust network, an opportunity for peer learning, the prospects of mentorship, and a crowd-sourced catalog of career opportunities, are vital for your personal and professional progression. In this episode of "ACM-W Celebrating Technology Leaders" with host Bushra Anjum, you will hear from senior women technologists who have devoted decades of their lives, either as full-time careers or as passionate volunteers, to creating and nurturing empowering communities for technical women.

Watch the webinar “Language Matters: DEI and the Question of URM,” featuring Nicki Washington of Duke University and Tiffani L. Williams of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in discussion on the importance of language to promote inclusive environments for work and study. The webinar was organized by the ACM Education Board’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Computing Education Task Force and ACM’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council, and was moderated by DEI-CE co-chair Fay Cobb Payton.

Ruth Lennon, current chair of ACM-W Europe, has been appointed the next Global Chair of ACM-W. Ruth is the director of Craobh Technology Consulting, an organization that provides personalized solutions to industry problems. She is also a lecturer with 20 years of experience in the Department of Computing at Letterkenny Institute of Technology, Ireland, and has been a member of ACM for over 20 years.

Read more about Ruth Lennon's selection as Global Chair on the ACM-W website.

Shaimaa Lazem is an Associate Research Professor at the City for Scientific Research and Technological Applications in Alexandria, Egypt. Her interests include human-centered innovation, and responsible design of AI systems. She is a Leaders-in-Innovation fellow with the Royal Academy of Engineering in London since 2018, and the co-founder of the ArabHCI Community, an initiative that aims at promoting HCI research and education in Arab countries. In her interview, Lazem discusses her core research interests, decolonial approaches to technology design, and more.

Hang Li is the Head of Research at ByteDance, a multinational internet technology company headquartered in Beijing. Among its holdings, ByteDance owns TikTok, a short-form video hosting service, and Douyin, a Chinese counterpart. Li has published five books and more than 150 technical papers in areas including information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, and data mining. In his interview, Li discusses his work at ByteDance and their newest products, human language processing, and longstanding challenges in machine learning.

Sekou L. Remy is a Staff Research Scientist at IBM Research-Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. His research areas span AI, health informatics, and infrastructure performance modelling and analysis. Remy has authored more than 55 publications on topics including healthcare, learning, and data science. In his interview, he discusses the ability of AI to enable superhuman decision-making, applying technology to address Covid-19, and the computing and technology scene in and around Nairobi, Kenya.

ACM-W is the ACM Community of Support for Women in Computing. ACM-W supports, celebrates, and advocates internationally for the full engagement of women in all aspects of the computing field, providing a wide range of programs and services to ACM members and working in the larger community to advance the contributions of technical women.

The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct arose from the experiences, values and aspirations of computing professionals around the world, and it captures the conscience of the profession. It affirms an obligation of computing professionals both individually and collectively to use their skills for the benefit of society.

The open exchange of ideas is central to ACM’s mission. This requires an environment that embraces diversity and provides a safe, welcoming environment for all. ACM's Policy Against Harassment applies to all ACM activities, defines expected behavior and explains how to report unacceptable behavior.

ACM's Technology Policy Council and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council sponsored a free screening and public discussion of the film "Coded Bias" and how those in computer science fields can address issues of algorithmic fairness. The discussion, held on March 29, 2021, has been archived, and "Coded Bias" is now viewable on both PBS and Netflix.

ACM SIGACCESS has developed a new free guide to help committees organizing and executing accessible virtual conferences inclusive for people with disabilities. The guidance is based on accessibility standards such as the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and user experiences with virtual meetings, and provides a central resource for both best practices and links to other resources. Check out the guide at https://www.sigaccess.org/accessible-virtual-conferences/.

ACM Fellow Timothy Pinkston organized and moderated a panel on "Valuing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Our Computing Community" held as a joint session of several co-located virtual conferences in March 2021. The panel included John Hennessey, David Patterson, Natalie Enright Jerger, Margaret Martonosi, Bill Dally and Kim Hazelwood. Watch a recording of the session and read a recap in CACM.