The Association for Computing Machinery is a U.S.-based international learned society
for computing.
It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing
society.
It is a not-for-profit professional membership group.
Its membership is more than 100,000 as of 2011.
Its headquarters are in New York City.
The ACM and the IEEE Computer Society are the umbrella organizations for academic and
scholarly interests in computing.
Unlike the IEEE, the ACM is solely dedicated to computing.
Activities
ACM is organized into over 170 local chapters and 35 Special Interest Groups, through which
it conducts most of its activities.
Additionally, there are over 500 college and university chapters.
The first student chapter was founded in 1961 at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Many of the SIGs, like SIGGRAPH, SIGPLAN, SIGCSE and SIGCOMM, sponsor regular conferences
which have become famous as the dominant venue for presenting innovations in certain fields.
The groups also publish a large number of specialized journals, magazines, and newsletters.
ACM also sponsors other computer science related events such as the worldwide ACM International
Collegiate Programming Contest, and has sponsored some other events such as the chess match
between Garry Kasparov and the IBM Deep Blue computer.
Services ACM Press publishes a prestigious academic
journal, Journal of the ACM, and general magazines for computer professionals, Communications
of the ACM and Queue.
Other publications of the ACM include: ACM XRDS, formerly "Crossroads", was designed
in 2010 and is the most popular student computing magazine in the US.
ACM Interactions, an interdisciplinary HCI publication focused on the connections between
experiences, people and technology, and the third largest ACM publication.
ACM Computing Surveys ACM Computers in Entertainment
A number of journals, specific to subfields of computer science, titled ACM Transactions.
Some of the more notable transactions include: ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
ACM Transactions on Computational Logic ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
ACM Transactions on Database Systems ACM Transactions on Graphics
ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing,
Communications, and Applications IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems
Although Communications no longer publishes primary research, and is not considered a
prestigious venue, many of the great debates and results in computing history have been
published in its pages.
ACM has made almost all of its publications available to paid subscribers online at its
Digital Library and also has a Guide to Computing Literature.
Individual members additionally have access to Safari Books Online and Books24x7.
The ACM also offers insurance, online courses, and other services to its members.
Digital Library The ACM Digital Library contains a comprehensive
archive starting in the 1950s of the organization's journals, magazines, newsletters and conference
proceedings.
Online services include a forum called Ubiquity and Tech News digest.
There is an extensive underlying bibliographic database containing key works of all genres
from all major publishers of computing literature.
This secondary database is a rich discovery service known as The ACM Guide to Computing
Literature.
ACM adopted a hybrid OA publishing model in 2013.
Authors who do not choose to pay the OA fee must grant ACM publishing rights by either
a copyright transfer agreement or a publishing license agreement.
See.
ACM was a "green" publisher before the term was invented.
Authors may post documents on their own websites and in their institutional repositories with
a link back to the ACM Digital Library's permanently maintained Version of Record.
All metadata in the Digital Library is open to the world, including abstracts, linked
references and citing works, citation and usage statistics, as well as all functionality
and services.
Other than the free articles, the full-texts are accessed by subscription.
Competition ACM's primary historical competitor has been
the IEEE Computer Society, which is the largest subgroup of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers.
The IEEE focuses more on hardware and standardization issues than theoretical computer science,
but there is considerable overlap with ACM's agenda.
They occasionally cooperate on projects like developing computing curricula.
Some of the major awards in Computer science are given jointly by ACM and the IEEE–CS.
There is also a mounting challenge to the ACM's publication practices coming from the
open access movement.
Some authors see a centralized peer–review process as less relevant and publish on their
home pages or on unreviewed sites like arXiv.
Other organizations have sprung up which do their peer review entirely free and online,
such as Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Journal of Machine Learning Research
and the Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology.
Membership grades In addition to student and regular members,
ACM has several advanced membership grades to recognize those with multiple years of
membership and "demonstrated performance that sets them apart from their peers".
Fellows
The ACM Fellows Program was established by Council of the Association for Computing Machinery
in 1993 "to recognize and honor outstanding ACM members for their achievements in computer
science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission
of the ACM."
There are presently about 500 Fellows out of about 60,000 professional members.
Distinguished Members In 2006 ACM began recognizing two additional
membership grades, one which was called Distinguished Members.
Distinguished Members have at least 15 years of professional experience and 5 years of
continuous ACM membership and "have made a significant impact on the computing field".
Note that in 2006 when the Distinguished Members first came out, one of the three levels was
called "Distinguished Member" and was changed about two years later to "Distinguished Educator".
Those who already had the Distinguished Member title had their titles changed to one of the
other three titles.
Senior Members Also in 2006, ACM began recognizing Senior
Members.
Senior Members have ten or more years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous ACM membership.
Chapters ACM has three kinds of chapters: Special Interest
Groups, Professional Chapters, and Student Chapters.
Special Interest Groups
Professional Chapters As of 2011, ACM has professional & SIG Chapters
in 56 countries.
Student chapters As of 2014, there exist ACM student chapters
in 41 different countries.
These chapters include:
Conferences The ACM sponsors numerous conferences listed
below.
Most of the special interest groups also have an annual conference.
ACM conferences are often very popular publishing venues and are therefore very competitive.
For example, the 2007 SIGGRAPH conference attracted about 30000 visitors, and CIKM only
accepted 15% of the long papers that were submitted in 2005.
The ACM is a co–presenter and founding partner of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in
Computing with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.
There are some conferences hosted by ACM student branches; this includes Reflections Projections,
which is hosted by UIUC ACM.
Awards The ACM presents or co–presents a number
of awards for outstanding technical and professional achievements and contributions in computer
science and information technology.
Leadership The President of the ACM for 2014–2016 is
Alexander L. Wolf of Imperial College London, UK.
He is the successor of Vint Cerf, an American computer scientist who is recognized as one
of "the fathers of the Internet"; Alain Chesnais, a French citizen living in Toronto, Canada,
where he runs his company named Visual Transitions; and Dame Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton,
UK.
ACM is led by a Council consisting of the President, Vice–President, Treasurer, Past
President, SIG Governing Board Chair, Publications Board Chair, three representatives of the
SIG Governing Board, and seven Members–At–Large.
This institution is often referred to simply as "Council" in Communications of the ACM.
Infrastructure ACM has five “Boards” that make up various
committees and subgroups, to help Headquarters staff maintain quality services and products.
These boards are as follows: Publications Board
SIG Governing Board Education Board
Membership Services Board Professions Board
ACM–W: Association for Computing Machinery Council on Women in Computing
ACM–W, the ACM's council on women in computing, supports, celebrates, and advocates internationally
for the full engagement of women in computing.
ACM–W's main programs are regional celebrations of women in computing, ACM-W chapters, and
scholarships for women CS students to attend research conferences.
In India and Europe these activities are overseen by ACM-W India and ACM-W Europe respectively.
ACM-W collaborates with organizations such as the Anita Borg Institute, the National
Center for Women and IT, CRA-W. Athena Lectures
The ACM-W gives an annual Athena Lecturer Award to honor outstanding women researchers
who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.
This program began in 2006.
Speakers are nominated by SIG officers.
2006–2007: Professor Deborah Estrin of UCLA 2007–2008: Professor Karen Spärck Jones
of Cambridge University 2008–2009: Professor Shafi Goldwasser of
MIT and the Weitzmann Institute of Science 2009–2010: Susan Eggers of the University
of Washington 2010–2011: Mary Jane Irwin of the Pennsylvania
State University 2011–2012: Judith S. Olson of the University
of California, Irvine 2012–2013: Nancy Lynch of MIT
2013–2014: Katherine Yelick of LBNL 2014–2015: Susan Dumais of Microsoft Research
Publications In 1997, ACM Press published Wizards and Their
Wonders: Portraits in Computing, written by Christopher Morgan, with new photographs by
Louis Fabian Bachrach.
The book is a collection of historic and current portrait photographs of figures from the computer
industry.
See also
References
External links Official website
ACM portal for publications ACM Digital Library
Association for Computing Machinery Records, 1947-2009, Charles Babbage Institute, University
of Minnesota.