2023 Gordon Bell Prizes Awarded at SC23
An eight-member team drawn from American and Indian institutions has been awarded the 2023 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their project, “Large-Scale Materials Modeling at Quantum Accuracy: Ab Initio Simulations of Quasicrystals and Interacting Extended Defects in Metallic Alloys.” The ACM Gordon Bell Prize tracks the progress of parallel computing and rewards innovation in applying high-performance computing to challenges in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics. Read the ACM news release.
ACM also presented a 19-member team with the inaugural ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling for their project, “The Simple Cloud-Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model Running on the Frontier Exascale System.” The new award aims to recognise innovative parallel computing contributions toward solving the global climate crisis. Read the ACM news release.
Both awards were presented during the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC23).
2023 ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships
ACM and the IEEE Computer Society have announced that James Gregory Pauloski of the University of Chicago and Rohan Basu Roy of Northeastern University are the recipients of the 2023 ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships. Hua Huang of the Georgia Institute of Technology received an Honorable Mention. Pauloski is recognised for optimising HPC resource usage via scalable optimisation methods for deep learning training and improving the efficiency of data fabrics in applications spanning heterogeneous resources. Roy is recognised for methods and tools that exploit cloud computing and on-premise HPC resources to enhance the productivity of computational scientists and the sustainability of HPC. Huang is recognised for contributions to high-performance parallel matrix algorithms and implementations and their application to quantum chemistry calculations. Read the news release.
Featured ACM Member: Julie Williamson
Julie Williamson is a Senior Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Glasgow, where she leads the Future Immersive Interaction Group. Her current research focuses on social signal processing in social immersive experiences, as well as exploring interpersonal social signals between individuals and across realities. Williamson served as the Papers Co-Chair for the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (ACM CHI) in both 2022 and 2023 and is the Technical Program Co-Chair for CHI 2024 which will take place in Honolulu, Hawaii. She is also a member of the ACM Publications Board and the ACM Digital Library Board.
In her interview, she discusses “design fiction,” being part of the annual ACM CHI Conference organising committee, studying the willingness of users to perform gestures using their mobile devices in public spaces, and more. Read Williamson’s interview here.
Featured ACM Member: Wenwu Zhu
Wenwu Zhu is a Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. His research interests include multimedia intelligence and graph machine learning. Zhu has been a leading volunteer with ACM conferences including the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), where he served as General Co-Chair in 2019, and ACM Multimedia, where he served as General Co-Chair in 2018 and Technical Program Chair in 2014. He received ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement Award in 2023. He has received many Best Paper Awards at ACM and IEEE conferences. Zhu is a Fellow of AAAS, IEEE and was recently named an ACM Fellow for contributions to multimedia networking and network representation learning. In his interview, he discusses advances in multimedia research, challenges to mining information from networks, and more. Read Zhu’s interview here.
ACM ByteCast: Noriko Arai
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes Noriko Arai, a Professor in the Information and Society Research Division of the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan. She is a researcher in mathematical logic and artificial intelligence and is known for her work on a project to develop robots that can pass the entrance examinations for the University of Tokyo. She is also the founder of Researchmap, the largest social network for researchers in Japan.
In the interview, Noriko and Scott discuss the challenge of being a creative in the modern academic environment, where publishing is paramount, and how her multidisciplinary background, which spans law, economics, and mathematics, has been an asset in her scientific research. She also mentions her 2010 book, How Computers Can Take Over Our Jobs, how that led to her work on the Todai Robot Project, and much more. Listen to ACM ByteCast interviews here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
ACM TechTalk: “Unpredictable Black Boxes are Terrible Interfaces” with ACM Fellow Maneesh Agrawala
Register now for the next free ACM TechTalk, “Unpredictable Black Boxes are Terrible Interfaces” with ACM Fellow Maneesh Agrawala, presented on Tuesday, December 5 at 2:00 pm ET/7:00 pm UTC, ACM Fellow and Forest Baskett Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.
Modern generative AI models are capable of producing surprisingly high-quality text, images, video, and even program code. Yet the models are black boxes, making it impossible for users to build a mental model for how the AI works. Users have no way to predict how the black box transmutes input controls into the output text, images, video, or code. In this talk, Agrawala asserts that such unpredictable black boxes are terrible interfaces and that the ambiguity of natural language and a lack of shared semantics between AI models and human users are partly to blame, and will suggest approaches for improving the interfaces to the AI models.
NOTE: New procedure requires registrants to log in with their ACM Accounts and help ACM gather some demographic information before accessing the registration link. Visit the TechTalks Archive for our full listing of past TechTalks.
