Srinivas Devadas Receives 2026 CS Eckert-Mauchly Award
Srinivas Devadas, the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the recipient of the 2026 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award. Devadas pioneered the field of hardware security at a time when it was considered by many to be a niche or even fanciful pursuit. However, in the last 25 years, with the advent of smart phones and cloud computing, the majority of information is now stored in the computing infrastructure.
Hardware security has become a fundamental design principle in computer architecture with most design groups now maintaining dedicated teams focused on security. Devadas coupled foundational research with a range of practical and widely adopted defenses that have shaped both academia and industry. Read the ACM news release.
ACM Posts Strongest JCR and Impact Factor Showing to Date
The Publications of ACM, which completed their transition to full open access publishing in the beginning of 2026, posted their strongest performance to date in the latest Journal Citation Reports (JCR) from Clarivate Analytics, with over 83 per cent of journals increasing or maintaining their impact factor versus the previous year’s results. 20 ACM publications are in the first quartile in one or more categories, with 12 in the top 10 in one or more categories.
ACM Director of Publications Scott Delman commented, “There is so much to celebrate this year in ACM publications, with our historic move to full open access publishing across our journals, magazines, and proceedings. These landmark JCR results are confirmation of the impact and reach that ACM’s top-quality publications can achieve when we embrace openness and open science.” Read the news release.
Featured ACM Member: Anicia Peters
Anicia Nicola Peters is the Chief Executive Officer of Namibia’s National Commission on Research, Science and Technology (NCRST). Among her earlier roles, she was the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research, Innovation, and Development at the University of Namibia, a Faculty Dean at the Namibia University of Science and Technology, and the Chairperson of the Namibia Presidential Task Force on the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Peters’ research interests include social computing, gender in digital technologies, responsible artificial intelligence systems, and e-health. Among her honors she has received an International Fulbright Science and Technology Award, a Schlumberger Faculty for the Future Women in Science fellowship, a Google Anita Borg Scholarship, and a Google Inclusion Award. She was also inducted into the Namibian Business Hall of Fame. Peters has started two ACM chapters in Namibia and the Africa Human Computer Interaction Conference (AfriCHI). She is also the ACM CHI2028 General Co-Chair which will be in South Africa and is currently a member of the ACM Global Engagement Board representing the Africa region.
In her interview, she discusses her interest in social computing, weaving HCI education into curricula across Africa, her work with the ACM Global Engagement Board, and more.
Featured ACM Member: Paolo Ferragina
Paolo Ferragina is a Professor of Computer Science at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. His research has been primarily focused on the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures for data-intensive platforms. He works to apply algorithmic insights to compressed storage, mining, and the search for information in large amounts of data, mainly in the form of texts, graphs and time series.
His research has been supported and stimulated in the past by many industrial collaborations, such as Bloomberg (London), Cerved Group (Italy), European Broadcasting Union (Geneve), Google (Zurich), SadasDB (Italy), Software Heritage Archive (France), Spazio Dati (Italy), ST Microelectronics (Italy), Tiscali (Istella’s search engine, Italy), Yahoo! Research (Barcelona), etc.
In his interview, he discusses the development of early search engines, the importance of data-compressing algorithms, how machine learning can evaluate soccer players, and more.
Read Ferragina’s interview here.
ACM TechTalk: Guglielmo Iozzia
View the recent ACM Techtalk “The Untapped Business Potential of Small Language Models ” with Guglielmo Iozzia, Director of AI and Applied Mathematics at MSD (Merck & Co.). Iozzia is also a Distinguished Member of the American Society for Artificial Intelligence. He is the author of Domain-Specific Small Language Models (Manning Publications) and Hands-on Deep Learning with Apache Spark (Packt).
This talk challenges the assumption that AI value must live in the cloud and questions another deeply rooted industry habit: the belief that every AI solution must start from pretrained foundation weights. As cloud AI becomes increasingly expensive, centralised and difficult to govern, domain-specific Small Language Models may represent a turning point: a shift from universal intelligence to deployable intelligence.
ACM ByteCast: Kelly Shortridge
In this episode of ACM ByteCast Scott Hanselman welcomes ACM Queue Editorial Board member Kelly Shortridge, Chief Product Officer at Fastly, where she previously served as VP of Security Products. Shortridge is the author of Security Chaos Engineering: Sustaining Resilience in Software and Systems (O’Reilly). An accomplished product executive, software innovator, and internationally recognised technical expert on resilience in complex systems, she is known for the application of behavioral economics, resilience, and DevOps principles to cybersecurity, and modernising security programs.
Here, Shortridge explains what security chaos engineering is building systems that can recover quickly from inevitable failures. She makes an argument that organizations should prioritize adaptability, redundancy, and recovery over prevention and encourages great collaboration between security and platform engineering teams. The conversation covers “metrics theater,” the cost-resilience tradeoff, why software has unique advantages for simulation that we’re not leveraging, and where LLMs fit (and don’t fit) in security workflows.