ACM Officers

ACM President

Yannis Ioannidis

Yannis Ioannidis is a Professor of Informatics & Telecom at the University of Athens, Greece since 1997. Prior to that, he was a Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1986–1997. He has also served as the President and General Director of ATHENA, the only research & innovation center in Greece focusing exclusively on information technologies (2011–2021).

His research interests include database and information systems, data science, data and text analytics, scalable data processing, recommender systems and personalization, and digital storytelling. His work is often multidisciplinary, motivated by problems that arise in the Life, Physical, or Social Sciences, the Humanities, and the Arts. He has published over 160 articles, holds three patents, and has co-founded one start-up based on the results of his group’s research.

Ioannidis is an ACM and IEEE Fellow (both essentially "for contributions to database systems, particularly query optimization"), a member of Academia Europaea, and a recipient of several research and teaching awards, including the Presidential Young Investigator Award, the UW Chancellor's Teaching Award, a VLDB 10-Year Best Paper Award, and the Xanthopoulos-Pnevmatikos Award on Outstanding University Teaching (presented by the President of Greece).

He has been leading OpenAIRE—the open access infrastructure in Europe—for over a decade and serves on the Advisory Board of the new Destination Earth initiative, the Executive Board of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures, and the Steering Committee of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering.

An ACM member since 1983, he has served as ACM Secretary/Treasurer (2018–2020), SIGMOD (SIG on Management of Data) Chair (2009–2013) and Vice-Chair (2005–2009), and as a member of the ACM Europe Council, the SIG Governing Board Executive Committee, and the ACM Publications Board. Currently he serves on the ACM Digital Library Board, is a CACM Associate Editor, the faculty advisor of the ACM Student Chapter of his university and will chair the ACM Europe Council Working Group on Summer Schools, having organized the Council’s first three summer schools on the topic of Data Science. In 2017, he received the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.

ACM Vice President

Elisa Bertino

Elisa Bertino is a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, where she leads multi-disciplinary research in IoT security, data security and privacy, 4G and 5G cellular networks and mobile systems security, analytics for security, and digital identity management. She has made pioneering contributions for over 30 years to data management and data security theory and systems, and has worked to broaden participation in computing via professional leadership and mentoring. Her work in data security and privacy includes context-based access control, privacy-preserving analytics, and data protection from insider threats. She led the development of Purdue Computational Research Infrastructure for Science (CRIS), released as open-source software in 2016.

She served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing and as coordinating Co-Editor-in-Chief of Very Large Database Systems Journal (VLDB). She chaired ACM’s Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) from 2009–2013. In 2011, she co-founded ACM’s Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY), now considered the main forum for high-quality research on data privacy and security.

Bertino is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. She received the 2019–2020 ACM Athena Lecturer Award and was named to GSMA’s Mobile Security Research Hall of Fame for her work on 4G and 5G cellular network security. She received the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award for her seminal research and outstanding leadership in data security and privacy over 25 years, the 2002 IEEE CS Technical Achievement Award for her contributions to database systems and security and advanced data management systems, and the 2005 IEEE CS Tsutomu Kanai Award for pioneering and innovative research contributions to secure distributed systems.

ACM Secretary-Treasurer

John West

John West is Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), one of the largest supercomputing centers in the world. In this role his responsibility is to ensure that TACC provides the right mix of technology and expertise to enable its tens of thousands of users to make new scientific discoveries across hundreds of scientific disciplines.

Before joining TACC, he was Director of the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program, a multi-hundred million-dollar DOD-wide program that provides high performance computers and computational expertise to the DOD research community. Prior to that he held positions in private industry and the federal government, with responsibilities in computational modeling and high-performance infrastructure. He also founded the technical news site insideHPC.com, achieving 1.5 million pageviews per month before he sold it three years after launch. The company remains successful.

West was a founding officer of the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) and responsible for communications and member recruitment, setting records for financial viability and member growth. He also served as SIGHPC's Vice Chair, and now serves as its Chair. His efforts to foster a more inclusive computing community include the creation of programs that have awarded more than $2 million in fellowships and awards internationally to women and members of other groups underrepresented in computing. West also served as founding Co-Chair of ACM's Diversity and Inclusion Council and was a member of the ACM Council from 2019 to 2021. Between 1996 and 2020 he held leadership roles in one of ACM's largest conferences and has served in multiple capacities on editorial boards, most recently as Associate Editor-in-Chief. He is a recipient of the Army's R&D award, past Chair of the High End Computing working group of the National IT R&D Subcommittee, and a Distinguished Fellow of the Bagley College of Engineering at Mississippi State University.

ACM Past President

Gabriele Kotsis

Gabriele Kotsis is a Computer Science professor at Johannes Kepler University. In 2002, she was one of the co-founding Chairs of the Working Group for Professors in Computer Science within the Austrian Computer Society (OCG). From 2003 to 2007 she was President of the Austrian Computer Society, being the first female holding this position in Austria. In addition to her two-term presidency at OCG, Gabriele takes an active part in the Editorial Board of the OCG Book Series, in the working group Fem-IT (Association of Female University Professors in IT), and in the OCG award committee.

From 2007 to 2015 she served as Vice-Rector for Research at Johannes Kepler University (JKU). Her responsibilities included the development of R&D strategies and policies within the university, coordination and interaction with national and international governmental organizations and funding bodies, and the establishment of collaborations with other research organizations and business partners. Since 2016, Gabriele has been JKU´s representative in the ASEA-UNINET academic research network, which promotes cooperation among European and South-East Asian public universities. Her active involvement in this network led to her nomination and election as President from February 2019 to July 2020.

Kotsis has organized ACM conferences and workshops, and in 2016 received an award in appreciation of her accomplishments regarding the ACM womENcourage conference series. Kotsis is a founding member of the ACM Europe Council, serving from 2008 to 2016. In 2014, she became an ACM Distinguished Member for her contributions to workload characterization for parallel and distributed systems, and for founding ACM Europe. From 2016–2020, Kotsis served as Member-at-Large of the ACM Council, and then served as ACM President from 2020–2022.