ACM News for CCF Newsletter: June 2020

ACM News for CCF Newsletter: June 2020

TOP STORIES

AWARDS

ACM Announces 2019 Turing Award Recipients

ACM has named Patrick M. Hanrahan and Edwin E. Catmull recipients of the 2019 ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to 3-D computer graphics, and the revolutionary impact of these techniques on computer-generated imagery (CGI) in filmmaking and other applications.

Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan have fundamentally influenced the field of computer graphics through conceptual innovation and contributions to both software and hardware. Their work has had a revolutionary impact on filmmaking, leading to a new genre of entirely computer-animated feature films beginning 25 years ago with “Toy Story” and continuing to the present day.

Catmull is a computer scientist and former president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. Hanrahan, a founding employee at Pixar, is a professor in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University.

The ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” carries a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google, Inc. It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing.
ACM news release

ACM Names David Silver 2019 ACM Prize in Computing Recipient

ACM has named David Silver of University College London and Google's DeepMind the recipient of the 2019 ACM Prize in Computing for breakthrough advances in computer game-playing.

Silver is recognized as a central figure in the growing and impactful area of deep reinforcement learning. His most highly publicized achievement was leading the team that developed AlphaGo, a computer program that defeated the world champion of the game Go, a popular abstract board game. Silver developed the AlphaGo algorithm by deftly combining ideas from deep-learning, reinforcement-learning, traditional tree-search and large-scale computing. AlphaGo is considered a milestone in artificial intelligence research and was ranked by New Scientist magazine as one of the top 10 discoveries of the last decade.
ACM news release

Maria Balcan Receives 2019 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award

ACM has named Maria Florina "Nina" Balcan, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, the recipient of the 2019 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for foundational and breakthrough contributions to minimally-supervised learning. Balcan's influential and pioneering work in machine learning has solved longstanding open problems, enabled entire lines of research crucial for modern AI systems, and has set the agenda for the field for years to come.

The ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award is given to the outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution. This award is accompanied by a prize of $35,000. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or less at the time the qualifying contribution was made. Financial support for this award is provided by Microsoft.
ACM news release

Sarit Kraus Named 2020-2021 ACM Athena Lecturer

ACM has named Sarit Kraus, Professor of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, the 2020-2021 Athena Lecturer for foundational contributions to artificial intelligence, notably to multi-agent systems, human-agent interaction, autonomous agents and nonmonotonic reasoning, and exemplary service and leadership in these fields. Her contributions span theoretical foundations, experimental evaluation, and practical applications. Multi-agent systems are regarded as vital to the increasingly complex challenges within artificial intelligence and have broad applications in a number of areas.

Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award carries a cash prize of $25,000, with financial support provided by Two Sigma. The Athena Lecturer gives an invited talk at a major ACM conference of her choice.
ACM news release

ACM Honors Computing Innovators for Advances in Research, Education and Industry

ACM has announced the recipients of prestigious technical awards. These leaders were selected by their peers for making contributions that extend the boundaries of research, advance industry, and lay the foundation for technologies that transform society.

Paul Mockapetris is the recipient of the ACM Software System Award for development of the Domain Name System (DNS), which provides the worldwide distributed directory service that is an essential component of the functionality of the global internet.

Noga Alon, Phillip Gibbons, Yossi Matias and Mario Szegedy are recipients of the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for seminal work on the foundations of streaming algorithms and their application to large-scale data analytics.

Lydia E. Kavraki and Daphne Koller are the recipients of the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award. Kavraki is recognized for pioneering contributions to robotic motion planning, including the invention of randomized motion planning algorithms and probabilistic roadmaps, with applications to bioinformatics and biomedicine. Koller is recognized for seminal contributions to machine learning and probabilistic models, the application of these techniques to biology and human health, and for contributions to democratizing education.

ACM and the IEEE Computer Society have named Luiz Andre Barroso the recipient of the 2020 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award. Barroso, Vice President of Engineering at Google, was recognized for pioneering the design of warehouse-scale computing and driving it from concept to industry. Barroso is widely recognized as the foremost architect of the design of these new ultra-scale datacenters, which contain hundreds of thousands of servers and millions of disk drives, making possible the most prevalent applications used by the public today, including cloud computing, powerful search engines, and internet services.

ACM Recognizes Outstanding Service to the Field of Computing

ACM has recognized three individuals with awards for their exemplary service to the computing field. Working in diverse areas, the 2019 award recipients were selected by their peers for longstanding efforts that have strengthened the community. This year’s ACM award recipients made seminal contributions in areas including textbooks and educational tools, bibliographic resources, and advancing the computing community in India.

Mordechai Ben-Ari is the recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for his pioneering textbooks, software tools and research on learning concurrent programming, program visualization, logic, and programming languages, spanning four decades and aimed at both novices and advanced students in several subfields of computing.

Michael Ley is the recipient of the ACM Distinguished Service Award for creating, developing, and curating DBLP, an extraordinarily useful and influential online bibliographic resource that has changed the way computer scientists work.

Arati M. Dixit is the recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for contributing to the growth and diversity of ACM programs in India, especially ACM-W India.

AWARD NOMINATIONS

ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research Call for Nominations

ACM has established a special category of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize to recognize outstanding research achievements that use high performance computing (HPC) applications to understand the COVID-19 pandemic, including the understanding of its spread. The ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research will be presented in 2020 and 2021.

Recipients will be selected based on performance and innovation in their computational methods, in addition to their contributions toward understanding the nature, spread and/or treatment of the disease. Financial support of the $10,000 cash prize that accompanies the award is provided by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high performance computing and researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research.

Recipients will be offered the opportunity to present their work at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC 2020) and have their research published in The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA).

The new COVID-19-focused award is a complement to the longstanding ACM Gordon Bell Prize, which recognizes outstanding achievement in high performance computing applications. Nominations can be submitted via an online submission form and will be accepted through October 8, 2020.

STUDENT NEWS

Upcoming ACM Student Research Competitions: Submission Deadlines

• ESEC/FSE 2020, November 8-13, deadline June 26
• ASSETS 2020, October 26-28, deadline July 2
• ASE 2020, September 21-25, deadline July 10
• MICRO 2020, October 17-21, deadline July 17
• PACT 2020, October 3-7, deadline July 22
• SC20, November 17–19, deadline August 7
• SPLASH 2020, November 15–20, deadline August 15

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

ACM-W Student Scholarships for Attendance at Research Conferences

The ACM Women's Council (ACM-W) provides support for women undergraduate and graduate students in Computer Science and related programs to attend research conferences. This exposure to the computer science research world can encourage a student to continue on to the next academic level and/or to a postgraduate industry or academic position. For application form, notification dates and more information, please visit the scholarships page.

LEARNING CENTER

ACM Launches New ByteCast Podcast Series

In ACM’s new ACM ByteCast podcast series, hosts Rashmi Mohan and Jessica Bell (both members of the ACM Practitioners Board) 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. The first episode features 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award laureates John Hennessy and David Patterson, who talk about the paths that led them to pursue computing careers, their breakthrough work on the RISC microprocessor architecture, and the future of computing architecture. The second features 1974 ACM A.M. Turing Laureate Donald Knuth, author of the hugely popular textbook series, The Art of Computer Programming. Visit the archive page to listen to these and future ByteCasts.

TechTalks:

March 25: The Decision-Making Side of Machine Learning with ACM Fellow Michael I. Jordan

April 14: Data for Good: Ensuring the Responsible Use of Data to Benefit Society with ACM Fellow Jeannette Wing

May 22: Integrating AWS Lambda with Your Majestic Monolith with ReCollect Systems Founder Luke Closs

June 8: Leveraging the ACM Code of Ethics Against Ethical Snake Oil and Dodgy Development with ACM Committee on Professional Ethics Co-chairs Don Gotterbarn and Marty Wolf.

PUBLICATIONS NEWS

ACM Launches New Journals

ACM Transactions on Internet of Things (TIOT) features novel research contributions and experience reports in several research domains whose synergy and interrelations enable the Internet of Things vision.

Digital Threats: Research and Practice (DTRAP) targets the prevention, identification, mitigation and elimination of digital threats.

ACM/IMS Transactions on Data Science (TDS), joint publication of ACM and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, includes cross-disciplinary innovative research ideas, algorithms, systems, theory and applications for data science.

Communications of the ACM Publishes Special Section on East Asia and Oceania Region

Technology developments in Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Asia-Pacific countries including Japan and Korea are highlighted in this special section of the CACM April issue. The inventive minds of the researchers and practitioners in the region have put computing technology to great use as illustrated in diverse applications ranging from preserving cultural heritage to services designed to enhance the digital economy. Trends include advances in 5G, research in program analysis and trustworthy computing, and government initiatives in artificial intelligence and healthcare.

This section is free to read in the ACM Digital Library: click on the Table of Contents and scroll to the middle of the page to access the articles.

UPCOMING CONFERENCES

SIGGRAPH Asia 2020, November 17 to 20, Daegu, South Korea

The 13th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia attracts the most respected technical and creative people from all over the world who are excited by research, science, art, animation, gaming, interactivity, education and emerging technologies. Submissions of content are invited for several tracks; deadlines include: Courses: June 24; Art Gallery: July 1. Visit the conference submissions website for more deadlines and information.