ACM in the News 2019

"Twitter, Facebook Want to Shift Power to Users. Or Do They?"
The New York Times, December 18, 2019
World Wide Web creator and ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Tim Berners-Lee founded the company Solid to fix issues related to the centralized Internet by shifting ownership of personal data to users, and not to big corporations.

"Argonne-Led Team Wins Technology Challenge at SC19 "
Argonne National Laboratory, December 17, 2019
Multi-institutional project led by researchers at US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory wins SCinet Technology Challenge at SC19.

"Developing a Digital Twin"
University of Texas at Austin, December 4, 2019
Researchers present predictive digital twin for a custom-built unmanned aerial vehicle at SC19.

"Students learn about cybersecurity"
El Paso Community College, December 3, 2019
The ACM Student Chapter at EPCC and in collaboration with the White Sands Missile Range organized a workshop on cybersecurity titled "Man in the Middle Cybersecurity Capture the Flag Workshop."

"UNM's Estrada Honored at SC19"
University of New Mexico, November 26, 2019
University of New Mexico's Trilce Estrada receives the 2019 ACM Special Interest Group on High-Performance Computing (SIGHPC) Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing award at SC19.

"Tim Berners-Lee Launches 'Contract for the Web' to Govern Internet Giants, Governments"
Computing, November 25, 2019
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, recipient of the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his invention of the World Wide Web, has launched a global plan of action to govern the behavior of Internet giants and governments.

"A 'simulation booster' for nanoelectronics"
PhysOrg, November 22, 2019
Two research groups from ETH Zurich (who received the 2019 ACM Gordon Bell Prize) have developed a method that can simulate nanoelectronics devices and their properties realistically, quickly and efficiently.

"GPU-Powered Semi Simulation Snags Coveted Research Award"
NVIDIA, November 22, 2019
Researchers tapped GPUs in the world’s most powerful supercomputer to set a record simulating current flows through a chip, snagging the 2019 ACM Gordon Bell prize, awarded at the SC19 supercomputing conference.

"How the Gordon Bell Prize Winners Used Summit to Illuminate Transistors"
HPCWire, November 22, 2019
At SC19, ACM awarded the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, whose project, “A Data-Centric Approach to Extreme-Scale Ab Initio Dissipative Quantum Transport Simulations,” leveraged a new programming framework and the most powerful publicly ranked supercomputer to shine a light on the intricate behaviors of transistors.

"Behind the curtain of the 'ethical algorithm'"
Marketplace Morning Report, November 1, 2019
ACM Fellow Michael Kearns speaks about predictive algorithms on this business news show.

"Should Computer Science Be Required?"
Inside Higher Ed, October 28, 2019
2018 ACM Karlstrom Award recipient Robert Sedgewick says students who are not computer science majors encounter severe enrollment caps and watered-down or limited courses at many institutions.

"Fox honored with prestigious ACM-IEEE Computer Society's Ken Kennedy Award"
Indiana University Bloomington, October 23, 2019
Geoffrey C. Fox was honored for foundational contributions to parallel computing methodology, algorithms and software, and data analysis, and their interfaces with broad classes of applications.

"Researchers Visualize Climate Change with AI-Generated Images"
VentureBeat, October 23, 2019
Research co-authored by Yoshua Bengio, a co-recipient of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, aims to establish a metric to quantify the veracity of synthetic climate change images.

"Hollywood is STILL sexist: Study reveals women spent half as much time on screen as men in films released in 2017 and 2018"
Daily Mail (UK), October 17, 2019
A research team from KAIST University in South Korea used an AI-trained computer to scan through the faces on screen in the nearly two dozen films. The study (to be presented at CSCW 2019) found not only a lack of screen time for women, but a lack of character depth to them.

"High energy: Facebook's AI guru LeCun imagines AI's next frontier"
ZDNet, October 17, 2019
2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award co-recipient Yann LeCun believes unsupervised learning is key to acquiring intelligence as general as humans'.

"Hackers say they took over vote scanners like those coming to Georgia"
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 26, 2019
Jeremy Epstein, Vice Chair of ACM's US Tech Policy Committee, says the DEF CON report highlights the need for strong audits of paper ballots, as well as physical security of voting equipment.

"What Is the Future of Hadoop?"
ITPro Today, September 24, 2019
Article on Hadoop mentions ACM SIGKDD Treasurer Michael Zeller.

"Google expands Wi-Fi and adds toll-free Google Assistant line in India"
ZDNet, September 20, 2019
New Google Research India Lab will be led by ACM Fellow Manish Gupta.

"AI Learns to Defy Laws of Physics to Win at Hide-and-Seek"
New Scientist, September 17, 2019
The bots learned that cooperation—like passing objects to each other or co-building a hideout—was the quickest way to win. Said Chelsea Finn at Stanford University, 2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award recipient, “The main limitation of this kind of work is that it is in simulation.”

"Computing clubs collaborate to code for social good"
The Flat Hat (College of William and Mary), September 16, 2019
The College of William and Mary’s Society of Women in Computing, ACM and the Google Developer’s Club are partnering on CS + Social Good, a new project that's part of a national movement involving chapters at other universities.

"The 10 most important moments in AI (so far)"
Fast Company, September 16, 2019
AI timeline features ACM award recipients including Jeff Dean and Geoffrey Hinton.

"States Boost Computer Science Education Efforts"
U.S. News & World Report, September 11, 2019
A study by the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), and the Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance found that only 45% of US high schools offer classes in computer science, and that girls and minorities are underrepresented in those classes.

"Objects Can Now Change Colors Like a Chameleon"
MIT News, September 10, 2019
Said MIT’s Stefanie Mueller, "By giving users the autonomy to individualize their items, countless resources could be preserved, and the opportunities to creatively change your favorite possessions are boundless." Mueller received a 2017 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention.

"Shanghai's AI policies open doors for firms"
China Daily, August 28, 2019
1994 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Raj Reddy invited to speak at World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

"Ask the Know-It-Alls: How Do Machines Learn?"
Wired, August 26, 2019
Around 2012, the small community still working on the neural network approach to machine learning showed groundbreaking new results on speech and image recognition. This year, three researchers who brought about that revolution won the Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing.

"Cerebras CEO talks about the big implications for machine learning in company’s big chip"
ZDNet, August 21, 2019
ACM A.M Turing Award 2018 recipients Hinton, Bengio and LeCun cited for their work in deep learning.

"How to Join the Applied AI Revolution"
Forbes, August 16, 2019
ACM A.M Turing Award 2018 recipients’ contributions are responsible for some of the modern conveniences you might have started taking for granted, like Siri, Cortana or Alexa.

"Trilce Estrada Wins 2019 ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award"
Inside HPC, August 15, 2019
University of New Mexico researcher Trilce Estrada received the award for "deployment of machine learning for knowledge discovery in molecular dynamic simulations and in situ analytics."

”ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science 2019 Fellowships Announced"
HPCwire, August 7, 2019
The ACM Special Interest Group on High-Performance Computing (SIGHPC) has named six students to receive this year's ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellowships.

"World's First Sound Projector Targets Willing Individuals"
The Engineer (UK), August 5, 2019
Gianluca Memoli and colleagues at Sussex University demonstrated a sound projector they devised at SIGGRAPH 2019.

Xia Zhou Wins Award for Research and Outreach"
Dartmouth University, August 5, 2019
Dartmouth associate professor Xia Zhou studies mobile systems and wireless networking, with a focus on how light can be used as a medium for data communication and behavioral sensing. She is a recipient of ACM SIGMOBILE’s RockStar Award.

"How $1bn from Microsoft could help to mimic the brain"
Irish Times, August 1, 2019
"It's too big a problem,” says 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award co-recipient Geoffrey Hinton of the race to acquire artificial general intelligence. “I’d much rather focus on something where you can figure out how you might solve it.”

"Northeastern University Launches National Program to Boost Number of Women Majoring in Computing"
Northeastern University, July 31, 2019
An advisory council will guide the overarching strategy and direction of Northeastern’s Center for Inclusive Computing, and will include leaders on increasing the number of women in technology such as ACM-W Chair Jodi Tims.

"To Save the Internet, Silicon Valley Is Sending It to Space"
Discover, July 30, 2019
"I think mobile apps that need to transfer data in 'spotty' connectivity would benefit from the Bundle Protocol's patience," says former ACM President and 2004 ACM A.M. Turing Award Laureate Vint Cerf.

"With $1 Billion from Microsoft, an AI Lab Wants to Mimic the Brain"
The New York Times, July 23, 2019
Said Geoffrey Hinton, a Google researcher and co-recipient of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, “It's too big a problem. I'd much rather focus on something where you can figure out how you might solve it.”

"Utah County to Pilot Blockchain-Based Mobile Voting"
Computerworld, July 23, 2019
A recent report by ACM’s US Technology Policy Committee observed that until there is a fundamental technological breakthrough in Internet security, the best method of protecting election integrity remains mailed paper ballots.

"Researchers collaborate on method to explain 'fake news' to users"
TechXplore, July 18, 2019
Penn State and Arizona State researchers working to help explain why any piece of fake news is detected as being false present their findings at KDD 2019.

"Experts discuss pressing data science problems and solutions"
TechTarget, July 2019
Working with messy data and software engineering are two of the biggest data science problems that come into play when building more robust AI systems, said experts at the ACM-IMS Interdisciplinary Summit on the Foundations of Data Science in San Francisco.

"Fernando Corbató, a Father of Your Computer (and Your Password), Dies at 93"
The New York Times, July 12, 2019
Fernando Corbató, who received the 1990 ACM A.M. Turing Award, died on Friday at the age of 93.

"The AI Technique that Could Imbue Machines with the Ability to Reason"
Technology Review, July 12, 2019
Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Facebook, a professor at New York University and 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award co-recipient, suggested during a recent ACM webinar that the deep learning subcategory known as unsupervised learning could help the technology overcome this hurdle.

"How Etsy taught style to an algorithm"
Fast Company, July 11, 2019
Algorithm that taught Etsy styles presented at KDD 2019.

" Stephen Cook's pioneering career in computational complexity"
University of Toronto, July 5, 2019
ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Cook tackles the P vs. NP problem.

"Gelenbe Decreed a Commander of the National Order of Merit of France"
NYU Tandon School of Engineering, July 3, 2019
Erol Gelenbe, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, London, an ACM Fellow, and recipient of the ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award in 2008, was awarded the insignia of the Commander of the National Order of Merit of France.

"Angelika Amon and Dina Katabi named Carnegie Corporation ‘Great Immigrants’"
MIT News, July 2, 2019
MIT professors Amon and Katabi were named to the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s 2019 list of Great Immigrants, Great Americans. Katabi has also received a MacArthur Fellowship, the ACM Prize in Computing, and the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, among other honors.

"Speech Technology and Synthesis with Leigh Clark and Benjamin R. Cowan"
Irish Tech News, June 28, 2019
New speech recognition research presented at CHI 2019.

"Researchers make steps toward debugging tools for quantum computers"
PhysOrg, June 21, 2019
Princeton researchers present tools for debugging quantum computers at ISCA 2019.

"Multi-mobile (M2) Computing System Makes Android, iOS Apps Sharable on Multiple Devices"
Columbia Engineering, June 20, 2019
Researchers present new computing system that enables current, unmodified mobile apps to combine and share multiple devices across multiple smartphones and tablets at MobiSys 2019.

"National Emergency Alerts Potentially Vulnerable to Attack"
University of Colorado Boulder, June 20, 2019
Researchers share discovery that emergency text alerts authorized by the US president can, theoretically, be spoofed, at MobiSys 2019.

"3rd AI for Good Global Summit gives rise to ‘AI Commons’"
Biz Today, June 7, 2019
ACM is partner in this conference, which shone a spotlight on AI projects in fields including education, healthcare and wellbeing, social and economic equality, space research, and smart and safe mobility.

"MIT MediaLab Develops Cyborg Botany"
engineering.com, June 6, 2019
MIT team debuts cyborg botany project at CHI 2019.

"Why Should We Care About Technology Ethics? The Updated ACM Code of Ethics"
infoQ, June 5, 2019
The 2018 rewrite of the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct has brought it up-to-date with new technologies and societal demands.

"Russia hacked us: We made it far too easy—and still do"
The Hill, May 29, 2019
"My fellow computer scientists and I are generally not this emphatic, but we have long publicly warned that any forms of voting online, particularly by email, are vulnerable to undetectable attack," writes ACM US Technology Policy Committee Vice Chair Jeremy Epstein.

"Computing professionals: Leave internet connectivity out of voting machine guidelines"
Politico, May 29, 2019
ACM US Technology Policy Committee asks US Election Assistance Commission to prohibit internet connections from all voting equipment under an updated set of voluntary guidelines.

"Facebook's Robotic Arms, Legs Are Learning Faster Than Ever"
Bloomberg, May 20, 2019
Facebook chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, a 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award co-recipient, said the company’s researchers have a responsibility to “see around corners” to where technology might be heading.

"Five Outstanding Innovators Under Age 40 Honored at Design Automation Conference "
Design Automation Conference, May 16, 2019
The 56th Design Automation Conference (DAC) and its sponsors, including ACM, have announced the five recipients of this year’s Under-40 Innovators Award.

"W&M Computing Mentorship for Girls Wins Global Service Award for Second Year in a Row"
William & Mary, May 15, 2019
The College of William & Mary's Society of Women in Computing was named recipient of the ACM Student Chapter Excellence Award for Outstanding Community Service.

"Tech-Savvy People More Likely to Accept Robot Doctors: Study"
Daily Hunt (India), May 13, 2019
Study presented at CHI 2019 recruited participants from online workforce Amazon Mechanical Turk to gain better understanding of user psychology behind the acceptance of automation in clinics.

"Advances in AI-enabled language translation hold special promise for the developing world"
ITU News, May 9, 2019
ACM CEO Vicki Hanson discusses the promise of deep learning after Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun received ACM's A.M. Turing Award for their contributions to machine learning using deep neural networks.

"MIT’s Daskalakis Awarded 2018 Grace Murray Hopper Award by Academic Peers"
The National Herald, May 9, 2019
ACM honors Constantinos Daskalakis and Princeton's Michael J. Freedman with Grace Murray Hopper Award.

"President Pavlopoulos congratulates Prof. Daskalakis on winning ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award"
AMNA (Greece), May 9, 2019

"UC San Diego Computer Science and Engineering Professor Pavel Pevzner Receives ACM’s Paris Kanellakis Award"
UC San Diego, May 8, 2019
Pevzner receives award recognizing theoretical work that significantly advances computing.

"Better email automation"
Mirage News, April 29, 2019
MIT team to present new open-source tool that lets users write, test, and hone simple Python scripts for controlling incoming emails at CHI 2019.

"IIT professor, Microsoft scientist bag awards for contributions for linking computing to society"
Hindu Business Line (India), April 24, 2019
ACM Lawler Award recipient Meenakshi Balakrishnan and ACM Distinguished Service recipient Victor Bahl lauded for their contributions.

"Sedgewick recognized for contribution to computer science education"
Princeton University, April 24, 2019
Robert Sedgewick, founding Chair of Computer Science at Princeton, is the recipient of ACM’s 2018 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award.

"How AI could save the environment"
TechRepublic, April 19, 2019
ACM member Bistra Dilkina says environmental problems typically involve complex processes that scientists do not yet fully understand.

"Francine Berman Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences"
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, April 17, 2019
Berman in 2009 was the inaugural recipient of the ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award and is an ACM Fellow.

"The Power Platform Movement"
This Week in Enterprise Tech, April 12, 2019
Podcast features Mendel Rosenblum, researcher who came up with modern virtualization and recipient of first ACM Charles Thacker Breakthrough Award.

"Inaugural ACM Chuck Thacker Breakthrough Award"
iProgrammer, April 11, 2019
Mendel Rosenblum honored with award intended to recognize individuals with the same out-of-the-box thinking and “can-do” approach to solving the unsolved that Thacker exhibited.

"How the EU's AI ethics guidelines will impact US businesses"
TechRepublic, April 9, 2019
ACM US Technology Policy Committee members see EU guidelines as a constructive first step toward understanding of AI's potential and pitfalls.

"Study Awarded Top Paper of Past 50 Years"
The Daily Illini, March 29, 2019
The ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) cited research by scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the University of California, San Diego, and Northern Iowa University as the top paper of the past 50 years at its Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE 2019.

"Computer Science Has Genuine Rock Star: Xia Zhou"
Dartmouth News, March 25, 2019
Dartmouth College's Xia Zhou has been awarded ACM SIGMOBILE's RockStar Award.

"Stanford University Launches Institute for Human-Centered AI"
Stanford News, March 18, 2019
The Institute will be co-directed by Fei-Fei Li, who presented an ACM webinar in 2017; Jeff Dean, co-recipient of the 2012 ACM Prize in Computing, will serve on its advisory council.

"The Autocrat's New Tool Kit"
The Wall Street Journal (requires subscription), March 15, 2019
2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Yoshua Bengio is concerned the growing use of technology for political control amounts to “the 1984 Big Brother Scenario. I think it’s becoming more and more scary.”

"At Age 30, World Wide Web Is 'Not the Web We Wanted'"
Associated Press, March 12, 2019
Father of the World Wide Web and ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Tim Berners-Lee took the occasion of his invention's 30-year anniversary to discuss how its intended purpose has come up short, from a space for progress-oriented collaboration to a place saturated with intrusive surveillance, disinformation, and corporate control.

"Closing the Gender Gap in the Tech Industry"
60 Minutes, March 3, 2019
Code.org’s Hadi Partovi says tech gender gap has worsened in recent years, and he partly blames it on the fact that many attempts to recruit women, usually in high school or college, start too late. ACM is a partner in Code.org.

"Government and IT Industry-Funded AI Graduate Education Program to be Rolled Out Across U.K."
ComputerWeekly.com, February 21, 2019
University of Southampton professor (and former ACM president) Dame Wendy Hall says new initiatives will provide a way for students to develop AI skills and talent, while industry, universities, and others who aspire to be part of putting the UK at the forefront of the AI and data revolution should get involved with the effort.

"Gordon Bell Prize Highlights the Impact of AI"
Inside HPC, February 14, 2019
ACM Gordon Bell Prize recipients’ contributions highlighted.

"Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing"
UCBerkeley RISELab, February 10, 2019
ACM A.M. Turing Award winner David Patterson and colleagues release paper as follow-up to seminal paper on cloud computing.

"Stephen Ibaraki's Top Four Resources Spotlighting AI"
Forbes, February 8, 2019
ACM appears as #3 on this list; Learning Center cited.

"How to decide if a data science degree is worth it, and choose the right program"
Tech Republic, February 7, 2019
Co-Chair of ACM’s Data Science Task Force says that “colleges and universities are beginning to understand the need for data scientists, and are beginning to develop programs.”

"Developing a Moral Compass from Human Texts"
TU Darmstadt, February 7, 2019
TU Darmstadt researchers showed that artificial intelligence machines can learn a moral compass from humans at AIES 2019.

"Turing Award Winner Judea Pearl Believes to Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Researchers Should Teach Them Cause & Effect"
Analytics India, January 31, 2019
ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Judea Pearl argues that AI has been hampered by an incomplete understanding of what intelligence really is.

"Boston University researchers develop framework to improve AI fairness"
VentureBeat, January 30, 2019
Research presented by Boston University scientists at ACM-FAT* 2019 shows just how hard it is to evaluate fairness in AI algorithms and tries to establish a framework for detecting and mitigating problematic behavior in automated decisions.

"China’s Social Credit System Won’t Tell You What You Can Do Right"
TechCrunch, January 28, 2019
Research on China’s Social Credit System unveiled at ACM FAT* 2019 conference.

"Embedding Ethics in Computer Science Curriculum"
The Harvard Gazette, January 25, 2019
Harvard's Barbara Grosz (ACM Fellow and ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award recipient) and collaborators have devised a model that taps the expertise of the philosophy department and integrates it into more than 12 CS courses.

"Amazon Is Pushing Facial Technology that a Study Says Could Be Biased "
The New York Times, January 24, 2019
Study on facial recognition technology presented at AIES 2019 reveals potential bias.

"The Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting Into Class"
The New York Times, January 24, 2019
ACM Fellow Tracy Camp, head of Colorado School of Mines CS Department, was determined not to put in deterrents like capping the major. Instead, she said, class sizes had sharply increased.

"Michael Stonebraker to Deliver Opening Keynote at Data Summit 2019 in Boston"
Database Trends and Applications, January 23, 2019
ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate and database technology pioneer Michael Stonebraker will deliver talk, “Big Data, Technological Disruption, and the 800-Pound Gorilla in the Corner,” at Data Summit 2019.

"MIT Professor: Blockchain Technology Could Create Borderless Economies"
CryptoGlobe, January 22, 2019
ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Silvio Micali says blockchain technology's scalability and decentralization could help facilitate borderless business transactions.

"Innovative Business Foundation Organizes Masters of Abstraction Gala Dinner & Scientific Programme"
World Executives Digest, January 21, 2019
Five laureates of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, ACM Prize in Computing and Fields Medal met young scientists in Hong Kong for the first time.

"Levchin Prize Names Winners at the 2019 Real-World Crypto Conference"
Business Wire, January 9, 2019
Mihir Bellare, recipient of ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, receives Levchin Prize.