ACM CEO Vicki Hanson to Receive HCI Medal for Societal Impact
The HCI International 2024 Conference has announced that ACM CEO Vicki Hanson has been chosen to receive the 2024 HCI Medal for Societal Impact. The HCI Medal for Societal Impact was established in 2022 to be awarded to academics, researchers or professionals in recognition of the impact of their work in the field of human-computer interaction on society. The medal will be conferred during the conference Opening Plenary Session, to be followed by the Keynote speech. The conference will take place June 31–July 4, 2024 in Washington DC.
Keshav Pingali Recognised With ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award
Keshav Pingali, the W.A. ”Tex” Moncrief Chair of Grid and Distributed Computing at the University of Texas at Austin, has been named the recipient of the 2023 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award for contributions to high-performance parallel computing for irregular algorithms such as graph algorithms. He is also cited for leadership on the Galois Project, which provides a unifying framework for parallelising both irregular and regular algorithms.
The Ken Kennedy Award recognises groundbreaking achievements in parallel and high-performance computing. Pingali is cited for contributions to high-performance parallel computing for irregular algorithms such as graph algorithms. The award will be formally presented to Pingali in November at The International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC23).
Featured ACM Member: Stephanie Ludi
Stephanie Ludi is a Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas. Her research interests include accessibility in computing and tool support for the visually impaired, block-based programming, and the use of machine learning in support of software development activities. Ludi serves as Co-Chair of ACM’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council (DEI). The ACM Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council is focused on enhancing the governance, programs, and activities of ACM with the goal of driving a more inclusive culture within the organization and the global community it serves.
In her interview, Ludi discusses how her own struggles with visual impairment led to her work in human-computer interaction, modifying block-based programming to allow visually impaired students to learn computer programming, and more.
Featured ACM Member: Partha Talukdar
Partha Talukdar is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google Research India and an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore. Talukdar completed his undergraduate degree from BITS Pilani and received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. His recent research has focused on inclusive and equitable language technology development through multilingual-multimodal Large Language Modeling. Talukdar also founded Kenome, an enterprise knowledge graph company with the mission to help enterprises make sense of big dark data.
Talukdar also received the ACM India Early Career Researcher Award for combining deep scholarship of natural language processing, graphical knowledge representation, and machine learning. In his interview, he discusses challenges with natural language processing, the NELL project at CMU, the long-standing problem of word sense disambiguation and more.
Read Talukdar’s interview here.
ACM ByteCast: Regina Barzilay
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast, hosts Sabrina Hsueh and Adela Grando welcome Regina Barzilay, a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI & Health in the Department of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the AI Faculty Lead at MIT Jameel Clinic. She develops machine learning methods for drug discovery and clinical AI. In the past, she worked on natural language processing.
Barzilay describes her career journey, and how a personal experience with the healthcare system led her to work on an AI-based system for the early detection and prediction of breast cancer. She explains why entering the interdisciplinary field of clinical AI is so challenging, offers valuable advice on how to overcome some of these challenges, talks about inequity in medicine and more.
ACM TechTalk: The (Medium Term) Future of Evolutionary Architecture”
Register now for the next free ACM TechTalk, “The (Medium Term) Future of Evolutionary Architecture,” presented on Thursday, November 2 at 12:00 pm ET (6:00 pm UTC) by Rebecca Parsons, CTO-Emerita at ThoughtWorks. Vanya Seth, Head of Technology for ThoughtWorks India, will moderate the questions and answers session following the talk.
A major premise underlying Evolutionary Architecture is that not only will things change, but we can’t predict how they will change. While this premise makes predicting anything problematic (at best), we can postulate how the principles and practices of Evolutionary Architecture may change in the near medium term. This talk will first introduce Evolutionary Architecture and then examine some possible futures for the principles and practices of Evolutionary Architecture, specifically addressing changes that might arise from innovations in AI, observability, and new architectural approaches.
Visit the TechTalks Archive for our full listing of past TechTalks.
