ACM News for CCF Newsletter: September 2020

ACM News for CCF Newsletter: September 2020

TOP STORIES

AWARDS

Pioneer of Modern Datacenter Design Luiz Barroso Receives Eckert-Mauchly Award
ACM and the IEEE Computer Society have named Luiz André Barroso, Vice President of Engineering at Google, recipient of the 2020 Eckert-Mauchly Award 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. The cornerstone of his architectural vision was to think of a system holistically, weaving together the individual compute, storage, and networking components into an overall design across large-scale distributed systems. Barroso was formally recognized with the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award at the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), which was held virtually.
Read the ACM news release.

Tel Aviv University Graduate Dor Minzer Receives ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
Dor Minzer of Tel Aviv University is the recipient of the 2019 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “On Monotonicity Testing and the 2-to-2-Games Conjecture.” The key contributions of his dissertation are settling the complexity of testing monotonicity of Boolean functions and making a significant advance toward resolving the Unique Games Conjecture, one of the most central problems in approximation algorithms and complexity theory. Honorable Mentions for the 2019 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award went to Jakub Tarnawski of École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) for "New Graph Algorithms via Polyhedral Techniques" and JiaJun Wu of Massachusetts Institute of Technology for "Learning to See the Physical World."
Read the ACM news release.

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

ACM Student Research Competition 2020 Grand Finals Winners
The ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), sponsored by Microsoft, has announced its Grand Finals winners. There are two rounds of competition at each conference hosting an SRC, which culminates in a Grand Finals competition. All undergraduate and graduate student winners from the SRCs held during the year advance to the SRC Grand Finals, where they are evaluated by a different panel of judges via the Web. This year's SRC Grand Finals winners are:

Graduate Category:

First Place: Peter Li, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "A Mutual Information Accelerator for Autonomous Robot Exploration" (SIGMICRO 2019)

Second Place: James Davis, Virginia Polytechnic and State University "On the Impact and Defeat of Regex DoS" (ESEC/FSE 2019)Third Place: Hasindu Gamaarachchi, University of New South Wales "Real-time, Portable and Lightweight Nanopore DNA Sequence Analysis Using System-on-Chip" (ESWEEK 2019)

Undergraduate Category:

First Place: Zhaowei Xi, Tsinghua University "High-performance Flexible Packet Generator Using Programmable Switching ASIC" (SIGCOMM 2019)

Second Place: Alexander Zlokapa, California Institute of Technology "A Deep Learning Approach to Noise Prediction and Circuit Optimization for Near-term Quantum Devices"(SC19)

Third Place: Ocean Hurd, University of California, Santa Cruz "Insights for More Usable Virtual Reality Games for People with Ambylopia" (ASSETS 2019)

Read the ACM news release.

Upcoming ACM Student Research Competitions: Submission Deadlines

ICCAD 2020, November      2-5, deadline September 21

SIGCSE 2021, March      17–21, deadline October 23

ICSE 2021,      May 23–29, deadline      January 4, 2021

CHI 2021,      May 8-13, deadline January 11, 2021

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 ByteCast Interviews
In ACM’s new ACM ByteCastpodcast 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, including Kristian Lum, Radia Perlman, and ACM A.M. Turing Award Laureates Donald Knuth, John Hennessy and David Patterson. You can listen to recent ByteCasts here.

ACM TechTalks
ACM members and non-members alike are welcome to attend our popular series of free TechTalks by expert industry professionals, distinguished ACM award laureates, and visionary researchers from industry and academia. Recent ACM TechTalks:

July 8:  Apache Arrow and the Future of Data Frames with Wes McKinney, Director of Ursa Labs

July 24: Abuses and Misuses of AI: Prevention vs. Reaction with Facebook AI Researcher Cristian Canton

August 11:  How to Create Generalizable AI with Anima Anandkumar, Director of ML Research, NVIDIA and Bren Professor, California Institute of Technology

September 1: Quantum Networks: From a Physics Experiment to a Quantum Network System with Stephanie Wehner, Professor and Roadmap Leader in Quantum Internet and Networked Computing at Delft University of Technology 

PUBLICATIONS NEWS

Special Issue of ACM Interactions Explores HCI Design Challenges Post-COVID
The July/August issue of ACM's Interactions magazine explores the ways in which critical research and emerging practices in computer-human interaction design are being applied to address societal challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. In late March, Editors-in-Chief Daniela Rosner, Alex Taylor and Mikael Wiberg canceled planned editorial content for the issue and instead solicited community responses and reactions to the pandemic as they were happening. They issued a call for participation, seeking thoughts, reflections, and responses to the crisis from computing researchers, designers, scientists, and technologists from around the world. The issue, a collection of those responses, helps answer critical questions, such as how to continue with design work and scholarship in these times; how the HCI community should adjust and react; and what might be more equitable ways of approaching design and building technologies in light of COVID-19.
Read the ACM news release.

ACM, SAGE Publishing to Launch New Journal, Collective Intelligence
ACM is collaborating with SAGE Publishing and Nesta on Collective Intelligence, a new open access journal, which will bring together formerly siloed communities of researchers and practitioners in areas such as computer science, economics, biology, sociology, political science, and philosophy. The online-only, gold open access journal will bring together and shape an emerging field devoted to understanding group performance in diverse systems, from adaptive matter, cellular and neural systems and animal societies to human organizations and systems of all kinds, hybrid AI human teams and nanobot swarms.
Read the ACM news release.

UPCOMING CONFERENCES

Yoshua Bengio to Speak at AI for Good Global Summit September 29
The 2020 edition of the AI for Good Global Summit will be presented as a continuous digital event throughout the year, featuring weekly programming across multiple formats, platforms and time zones, including keynotes, expert webinars, project pitches, Q&As, performances, demos, interviews, networking and more. 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio will keynote on September 29, addressing machine learning challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2020, November 17 to 20 (online)
The 13th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia will attract 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.