ACM News
12th Heidelberg Laureate Forum 14-19 September 2025
The 12th Heidelberg Laureate Forum will offer young researchers and other participants the opportunity to connect with scientific pioneers and learn how the laureates made it to the top of their fields as some of the brightest minds in mathematics and computer science come together for an unrestrained, interdisciplinary exchange. This compelling networking event combines scientific, social and outreach activities in a unique atmosphere, sustained by comprehensive exchange and scientific inspiration.
Notable participants this year include 19 ACM Award recipients including ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Avi Wigderson, Robert Metcalfe, Jack Dongarra and Vinton Cerf, as well as ACM Prize in Computing recipients, Torsten Hoefler, Amanda Randles and David Silver, among many others. Sessions will also be livestreamed on the HLF website.
Call for Nominations for 2025 ACM Awards
Each year, ACM recognises technical and professional achievements within the computing and information technology community through its celebrated Awards Program and welcomes nominations for candidates whose work exemplifies the best and most influential contributions to our community and society at large. ACM’s award committees evaluate the contributions of candidates for various awards that span a spectrum of professional and technological accomplishments.
Please take a moment to consider those people in your community who may be suitable for nomination. When nominating, we ask people to consider ACM’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Candidates for advanced member grades (Fellow or Distinguished Member) must be ACM members. However, candidates for ACM Awards do not need to be members to be nominated.
Refer to the award nominations page for links to individual award pages, where you will find nomination requirements, deadlines, and Award Subcommittee Members. Most nominations are due 15 December 2025, but please check the individual award pages for specifics.
Featured ACM Member: Brad Myers
Brad A. Myers is a Professor and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the principal investigator of CMU’s Natural Programming project, which studies how people perform tasks and then design languages, application programming interfaces, and environments around these natural tendencies. Myers’ interests include interaction techniques, making programming easier, user interface software, handheld devices, intelligent user interfaces, and demonstrational interfaces.
Among his many honors, Myers has received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award and the Alan J. Perlis Award for Imagination in Computer Science. He is also the co-recipient of the 2025 Charles Babbage Institute’s (CBI) Human Computer Interaction History Prize for his book Pick, Click, Flick! The Story of Interaction Techniques.
In his interview, Myers discusses the formation of HCII at Carnegie Mellon, barriers to the envisioned future of AI, why low-level details matter, and more.
Featured ACM Member: Brian Harvey
Brian Harvey is Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. His interests include computer science education, curricula, programming languages, and visual languages. Harvey is the author of Computer Science Logo Style, a three-volume computer programming textbook which uses the Logo programming language, and Simply Scheme (with Matthew Wright), an introduction to computer programming for non-majors. With his Berkeley colleague Dan Garcia, Harvey developed the Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) curriculum, which began as a national pilot for the CSforAll movement.
Harvey recently received (with Garcia) the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for his work to bring computing to all students, especially those from historically underrepresented communities.contributions to the design of high-performance mobile networks and services.e international RoboCup competitions, novel applications of AI in the future, and more.
In his interview, Harvey discusses the inspiration behind his computer center at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, the success of the Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum, why grades are “evil,” and more.
ACM TechTalk: Jose Pedro Magalhaes
View the recent ACM Techtalk, “Functional Programming in Financial Markets,” with José Pedro Magalhães, Managing Director of Standard Chartered Bank. He is also one of the founders of Chordify. Before joining Standard Chartered, he was a postdoctoral research assistant in the Programming Languages group at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Oxford, working on the Unifying Theories of Generic Programming project.
In this talk Magalhães focuses on how we leverage functional programming to orchestrate type-driven large-scale pricing workflows. He builds upon decades of research and experience in the functional programming community, relying on concepts such as monads, lenses, datatype generics, and closure serialization—and concludes that the use of functional programming is one of the main drivers of project success with no significant downside.
ACM ByteCast: Maja Matarić
In this episode of ACM ByteCast Bruke Kifle hosts 2024 ACM Athena Lecturer and ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award recipient Maja Matarić—the Chan Soon-Shiong Chaired and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics at the University of Southern California (USC), and a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind. She is a roboticist and AI researcher known for her work in human-robot interaction for socially assistive robotics, a field she pioneered.
Here, Matarić talks about moving to the US from Belgrade, Serbia and how her early interest in both computer and behavioral sciences led her to socially assistive robotics, a field she saw as measurably helpful. She discusses the challenges of social assistance as compared to physical assistance and why progress in the field is slow, why Generative AI is conducive to creating socially engaging robots. She also touches on the issues of privacy, bias, ethics, and personalization in the context of assistive robotics, and more.
ACM ByteCast: Al Spector
In this episode of ACM ByteCast Rashmi Mohan hosts ACM Fellow and 2016 ACM Software System Award recipient Alfred Spector, Professor of Practice in the MIT EECS Department. He was previously CTO of Two Sigma Investments, and before that Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google. He played a key role in developing the Andrew File System (AFS), a breakthrough in distributed computing that later became a commercial venture. He is also known for coining the term “CS + X.” Spector is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hertz Foundation, and National Academy of Engineering, and recipient of the IEEE Kanai Award for Distributed Computing.
Here, Spector recounts how he initially pursued programming out of personal enjoyment in college, developing AFS at Carnegie Mellon University, the challenges of turning academic research into commercial products, and the transition from academia to entrepreneurship. He also touches on his time at IBM, the differences between startups and large corporations, some of his most notable work as a technical leader at Google, and more.