Call for ACM Award Nominations
Each year, ACM recognises technical and professional achievements within the computing and information technology community through its celebrated Awards Program. ACM welcomes nominations for candidates whose work exemplifies the best and most influential contributions to the computing community and seeks your help in expanding and diversifying the nomination pool for ACM’s awards.
Please take a moment to consider those people in your community who may be suitable for nomination. Refer to the award nominations page for links to individual award pages, where you will find nomination requirements, deadlines, and Award Subcommittee Members. Nominations for most awards are due December 15, 2025.
Refer to the award nominations page for nomination guidelines and the complete listing of Award Subcommittee Chairs and Members.
Featured ACM Member: Carla Chiasserini
Carla Fabiana Chiasserini is a Professor at Politecnico di Torino. Her research interests include algorithm design and analysis, machine learning for networking, wireless networks, and power management for networked devices. At Politecnico di Torino, Chiasserini is also Vice Head the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, as well as a member of the Interdepartmental Center for Automotive Research and Sustainable Mobility.
Chiasserini has received Best Paper Awards at various conferences and received an “Editor of the Year” award for her work on the Ad Hoc Networks journal. Chiasserini was recently named an ACM Fellow for contributions to the design of high-performance mobile networks and services.e international RoboCup competitions, novel applications of AI in the future, etc.
In her interview, she discusses how computer networks benefit from machine learning, medical applications of the O-RAN project, full exploitation of connected car data and more.
Read Chiasserini’s interview here.
Featured ACM Member: Ashish Sharma
Ashish Sharma is a Senior Applied Scientist at the Microsoft Office of Applied Research. He recently earned his PhD at the University of Washington. His work explores ways to model and understand the behaviors and skills of both humans and AI systems, combining techniques from natural language processing, reinforcement learning, data science, psychology, and mental health.
Sharma recently received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation “Human-AI Collaboration to Support Mental Health and Well Being.” In his dissertation, he developed fundamental advances in natural language processing to positively impact the mental health of large groups of people. Sharma’s work has been used by several organizations including Mental Health America.
In his interview, he discusses utilising intelligent agents at intersections, participating in the international RoboCup competitions, novel applications of AI in the future, and more.
In his interview, he discusses what drew him to the field of human-AI collaboration, how his technology works with differing mental health situations, its potential for long-term impact, and more.
Featured ACM Member: Sewon Min
Sewon Min is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI. At UC Berkeley, she is part of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR) as well as the Berkeley NLP Group. Min earned PhD and MSc degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington, as well as a BSc degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University.
Min was one of only two people who received an Honorable Mention for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. Her dissertation “Rethinking Data Use and Large Language Models” was credited with greatly improving our understanding of how large language models (LLMs) work as well as providing a roadmap of how to build the next generation of these technologies.
In her interview, she discusses the limitations of large language model learning, LLM’s and private information, designing models that align with data owner interests and more
ACM TechTalk: Charlee Stefanski and Constantin Gonciulea
View the recent ACM Techtalk “An Elementary Approach to Quantum Computing” with Charlee Stefanski and Constantin Gonciulea, authors of the newly released book Building Quantum Software (Manning). Their book offers a software developer’s approach to quantum computing without the need for advanced physics or math knowledge. Every chapter is equipped with hands-on lessons and toolkits to make you or your organisation “quantum ready”.
Here, they explore quantum computing from a developer’s perspective, using accessible computing and math concepts typically taught in the first year of computer science. The talk will cover subjects such as the Galton Board (Bean Machine)—sampling from probability distributions and randomness from determinism; the Double-Slit Experiment, which Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist David Feynman stated “has in it the heart of quantum mechanics,”; how the state of the quantum ”apparatus” can be represented by a list of complex numbers, and much more. Expect an emphasis on intuitive visualizations and animations to bring the subject to life.
ACM TechTalk: Felienne Hermans
View the recent ACM Techtalk “Programming for All: A Feminist Case for Language Design” with Felienne Hermans, Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Applied Science Lead at Microsoft and Connected AI Group Lead at MIT Media Lab.
Programming was once a female only field, all “computers” were women, many of color. However, that situation was short-lived, and today we live in a world in which almost all mainstream programming languages are created by men, many of a western background.
In this talk, Hermans reflects upon how programming language construction came to be so male dominated, and how with that also an overwhelming masculine discourse was formed. Drawing on work from feminism and Science and Technology Studies (STS), Hermans explores what the impact of masculine discourse is for the design of programming languages. She closes the talk with a sketch of what a different world for programming languages could look like, both in the context of her own Hedy language, and beyond.
ACM ByteCast: Henrique Malvar
In this episode of ACM ByteCast Rashmi Mohan hosts Henrique Malvar, a signal processing researcher at Microsoft Research (Emeritus). At Microsoft, he contributed to the development of audio coding and digital rights management for the Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Video, and to image compression technologies, such as HD Photo/JPEG XR formats and the RemoteFX bitmap compression, as well as to a variety of tools for signal analysis and synthesis.
Here, Malvar explains his early love of electrical engineering, building circuits from an early age growing up in Brazil, and later fulfilling his dream of researching digital signal processing at MIT. He describes his work as Vice President for Research and Advanced Technology at PictureTel, stresses the importance of working with customers to solve a variety of technical challenges, shares his journey at Microsoft, offers advice to aspiring researchers and emphasizes the importance of diversity to research and product teams, and more.