ACM MemberNet - Winter 2026

ACM Names 2025 Fellows

ACM has named 71 new Fellows. All are members selected by their peers for achieving remarkable results through their technical innovations and/or service to the field. This year’s honorees hail from 14 countries and were chosen from among ACM’s global membership of more than 100,000 computing professionals. The 2025 ACM Fellows work at leading universities, corporations, and research institutions in Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This year’s Fellows are cited for contributions in a wide range of computing research areas including AI for healthcare, computer graphics, data management, electronic mail, mobile computing, networked systems, robotics, sustainability, and numerous other areas. Read the news release.

ACM Names 2025 Distinguished Members

ACM has named 61 new Distinguished Members. All are members and were selected by their peers for significant technical achievements and/or volunteer service The 2025 ACM Distinguished Members work at leading universities, corporations, and research institutions in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Germany, India, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This year’s class of Distinguished Members are cited for contributions in a wide range of computing research areas including AI for healthcare, computing education, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, networked systems, security, software, sustainability, and numerous other areas. Read the news release.

ACM is Now Fully Open Access

As of January 1, 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library are now open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, discoverable, and reusable. This transition is the result of extensive dialogue with authors, SIG leaders, editorial boards, libraries, and research institutions worldwide. To make the DL fully open while remaining financially sustainable, its services are now offered in two editions: DL Basic provides free, public access to all research content, while DL Premium offers advanced tools and value-added services designed to support deeper discovery, analysis, and institutional research workflows. ACM is grateful for the community’s consistent advocacy for openness and its commitment to ensuring that computing knowledge is shared widely. Learn more here.

ACM MEMBERS IN THE NEWS

LeCun Warns Tech 'Herd' Is Marching into a Dead End

ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Yann LeCun is concerned Silicon Valley is heading for a dead end in AI development, arguing that large language models can become only so powerful. LeCun said in an interview, "There is this herd effect where everyone in Silicon Valley has to work on the same thing. It does not leave much room for other approaches that may be much more promising in the long term." Learn more here.

Hinton is Second Scientist With Over 1 Million Citations

ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Geoffrey Hinton is the second computer scientist after fellow Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio to receive more than 1 million citations on Google Scholar. Hinton's most-cited paper is the 2012 "ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks," which has received more than 180,000 citations. His second most-cited paper is the 2015 "Deep learning," co-authored by Bengio and fellow Turing Award laureate Yann LeCun, which has received more than 100,000 citations. Learn more here.

Brooks Says Robotics Field Has Lost Its Way

ACM Fellow Rodney Brooks - the "Godfather of Modern Robotics" - argues that today’s Silicon Valley obsession with humanoid robots is misguided and overhyped. Drawing on decades of experience, he says general-purpose, humanlike robots are far from practical, unsafe to deploy widely, and unlikely to achieve human-level dexterity anytime soon. Brooks warns investors are mistaking impressive demos and AI training techniques for real-world capability. He believes progress will come instead from specialized, task-focused robots that work alongside humans, not replace them. Learn more here.

AWARDS AND MEMBER RECOGNITION

Call for ACM Award Nominations

Each year, ACM recognizes 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 our community, and seeks your help in expanding and diversifying the nomination pool for our ACM 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, 2026. The next nomination deadline for Senior Members March 3, 2026. The next nomination deadline for ACM Distinguished Members is August 1, 2026.

SIG NEWS & AWARDS

2026 Candidate Slate Announcement

The following SIGs will hold elections in 2026: SIGDOC, SIGSIM, SIGSPATIAL, and SIGUCCS. ACM’s Policy and Procedures on SIG Elections require that those SIGs holding elections notify their membership of candidates for elected offices. Additional candidates may be placed on the ballot by petition. All candidates must be ACM Professional Members, as well as members of the SIG. Anyone interested in petitioning must inform ACM Headquarters, Pat Ryan ([email protected]) and the Secretary of the SIG of their intent to petition by March 13, 2026. Petitions must be submitted to ACM Headquarters for verification April 1, 2026. ACM SIGGRAPH’s election will commence on June 24, 2026. Learn more here.

After a short pause, SIGAI’s AI Matters newsletter is returning with a new vision, a broader scope, and an updated format. The newsletter will be a useful resource for the three primary communities of ACM SIGAI – AI researchers, professional practitioners, and students – helping everyone stay up to date with developments across the field. Learn more here.

New Emerging Interest Groups Established

Two new ACM Emerging Interest Groups (EIGs) have been established:

The ACM Emerging Interest Group on Trustworthy and Responsible Systems (EIGTRUST) aims to advance the design, verification, development, and deployment of trustworthy systems, including AI and data-centric computing systems across devices, platforms, and infrastructures. It emphasizes core qualities such as security, privacy, reliability, safety, transparency, fairness, and accountability, and supports the community through high-quality conferences, workshops, and journals. You can join here.

Digital transformation (DX) is an emerging computing discipline focused on applying data-driven, automated, and decision-making technologies to modernize industrial systems such as agriculture, energy, manufacturing, and transportation. The ACM Emerging Interest Group on Digital Transformation (EIGDX) aims to unify principles, advance computing techniques, and foster deep collaboration between computing and industry to address real-world infrastructure challenges. You can join here.

Best Paper Awards Given at Recent ACM SIG Conferences

ACM's Special Interest Groups (SIGs) regularly cite outstanding individuals for their contributions in 37 distinct technological fields. Some awards presented (or to be presented) at conferences:

CONFERENCES

ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems

The ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems (CAIS 2026) is the inaugural ACM conference dedicated to the design, evaluation, and engineering of compound and agentic AI systems. The conference focuses on system-level architectures—such as retrieval-augmented generation, multi-agent workflows, and verification pipelines—and emphasizes reproducibility through artifact-centric review. CAIS 2026 will be held May 26 – 29, 2026 in San Jose, California, USA. Learn more here.

ACM AI Leadership Summit

The ACM AI Leadership Summit 2026 will bring together leading researchers, educators, policymakers, and practitioners to examine foundational technical challenges and emerging opportunities in artificial intelligence. Through keynotes, panels, and interactive sessions, the Summit will explore frontier AI models, AI-powered scientific discovery, the future of work, and approaches for responsible, transparent, and human-centered innovation across diverse application domains. The event will be held Aug 30 – September 2, 2026 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Learn more here.

PUBLIC POLICY

Expanding Regions Technology Policy Committee

The Expanding Regions Technology Policy Committee (ER-TPC) was formed to respond to technology poli cy developments and make recommendations for jurisdictions beyond the scope of the established ACM Technology Policy Council’s regional committees. It will serve as the primary liaison for ACM’s engagement with government organizations in regions for which a designated regional TPC does not exist. The ER-TPC’s goal is to identify regions with sufficient policy activity and subject-matter expertise to warrant the creation of dedicated committees. Learn more here.

Response to the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) Request for Public Comments on the Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic Interactive Artificial Intelligence Services

The Expanding Regions Tech Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery welcomed the opportunity to respond to CAC’s Request for Public Comments on the Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic Interactive Artificial Intelligence Services (the “Measures”). The Asia-Pacific Tech Policy Subcommittee recommends several measures. Learn more here.

Comments in Response to European Commission Call for Evidence Survey on the “Digital Omnibus on Ai Regulation Proposal”

The ACM Europe Technology Policy Committee responded to the European Commission’s call for evidence launched on 13 November 2024 on the European Union’s “Digital Omnibus on AI Regulation Proposal”. Europe TPC supports the European Commission’s intent on refining the regulatory framework to ensure legal certainty and safety while fostering a competitive environment for innovation. Notwithstanding this general support, EuropeTPC put forward a set of recommendations for eight articles in the proposal. Learn more here.

TechBrief: Automated Speech Recognition

"TechBrief: Automated Speech Recognition.” recognizes that while Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) technology uses sophisticated machine learning algorithms to understand and transcribe spoken language to text, this raises interrelated ethical concerns about fairness, transparency, and accountability. Risks of systemic bias, misuse, and unintended harm in high-stakes decision-making inform these concerns. These risks can be addressed through rigorous audit and governance practices, as well as by opening opportunities for more inclusive and accessible speech technologies. Learn more here.

PUBLISHING NEWS

acmqueue: "Safe Coding"

Christoph Kern of Google describes "safe coding" as a collection of software design patterns and practices that cost-effectively provide a high degree of assurance against entire classes of vulnerabilities. Safe coding identifies risky operations and systematically eliminates their direct use in application code. This shifts responsibility for safety from the individual developer to the programming language, libraries, and frameworks. Read the full article here.

Peer Reviewer Training and Certification Course

Whether you're a student, early-career, or seasoned researcher, ACM invites you to take part in the Peer Reviewer Training and Certification course hosted on the ACM Peer Reviewer Gateway. The course aims to educate current and prospective reviewers on the principles and fundamentals of peer review and relevant ACM policies, and it offers concrete guidance on writing and submitting a review in a constructive and meaningful way. ACM’s peer reviewers embody an integral role within the publications program as their expertise contributes to ensuring that sound and high-quality research is published at ACM.

New ACM Books

Turning Points in the Analog and Digital World by Herbert Bruderer, presents “the digital age” as a central theme, covering digital transformation, social media, artificial intelligence, autonomous drones, and mobile robots as well as self-driving vehicles. Among many other topics, the author also discusses quantum computers, DNA data storage, 3D printing, and the power and influence of technology giants. It includes more than 500 illustrations from the fields of mathematics, computing, astronomy, surveying, time measurement, and the construction of automatons.

Multi-LLM Agent Collaborative Intelligence: The Path to Artificial General Intelligence by Edward Y. Chang, states that today’s large language models excel at pattern recall yet falter on long-range planning, self-critique, context loss, and the tendency of maximum-likelihood training to reward popularity over quality. MACI offers a promising route to AGI by orchestrating specialized LLM agents through explicit protocols rather than enlarging a single model. MACI also modulates linguistic behavior, tuning each agent’s contentiousness and emotional tone.

Biomedical Embedded Systems: From Design to Security by Nathan Allen, Hammond Pearce, and Partha Roop introduces a systematic design methodology for Medical CPSs (MCPSs) using the synchronous approach, which ensures deterministic and reactive execution—key to safety-critical performance. It also enables accurate modeling, verification, and automated code generation. This is a clear, practical guide to designing safe and verifiable medical cyber-physical systems.

Journals Welcome New Editor-in-Chiefs

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) welcomes Eitan Grinspun as its new Editor-in-Chief. The appointment is from January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2028. Grinspun is Professor of Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Toronto.

DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION

Celebrate Black History Month

Imagine being one of the first in your field or becoming a pioneering force who helped open the door for inclusion. For Black History Month 2026, ACM is excited to share a video series highlighting the stories of past and present Black pioneers in computing. Their groundbreaking work has shaped the computing field while expanding access to computer science for people with diverse backgrounds. Join us through the month of February to celebrate their legacies and achievements.

ACM-W Above and Beyond: Shin Hwei Tan’s Journey

As part of the ACM-W Above and Beyond Project, we are excited to feature Shin Hwei Tan, who is the recipient of the 2025 ACM-W Rising Star Award. This feature is particularly special: we catch up with Tan as we celebrate her remarkable journey—from an ACM-W scholarship recipient to an award-winning researcher and leader in the computing community. Read more here.

Words Matter

As part of ACM’s efforts to combat exclusion in the computing profession, ACM's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council has launched an effort to replace offensive or exclusionary terminology in the computing field. They have developed a list of computing terms to be avoided in professional writing and presentations and offer alternative language. The Council has recently expanded the list and invites the community to submit suggestions for consideration.

MEMBERSHIP

Featured Member Benefit: Reliable Life Insurance for ACM Members

Protect your loved ones with Group 10-Year Level Term Life Insurance—designed exclusively for ACM members. Lock in affordable, level rates. Coverage stays consistent for a full decade. Please visit here for more information.

LEARNING PROGRAMS

ACM ByteCast Interviews

ACM ByteCast is a podcast series from ACM’s Practitioner Board in which hosts Rashmi Mohan, Bruke Kifle, and Scott Hanselman interview researchers, practitioners, and innovators who are at the intersection of computing research and practice. In each monthly episode, guests will share their experiences, the lessons they’ve learned, and their own visions for the future of computing. Recent ByteCast interviews include:

Nicole Forsgren, Senior Director of Developer Intelligence at Google, Forsgren discusses her journey from psychology and family science to computer science, how she became interested in evidence-based arguments for software delivery methods, her role at Google, the relevance of the DORA metrics in a rapidly changing industry, and more.
2024 ACM A.M. Turing laureates Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton reflect on their long collaboration together and the personal and intellectual paths that led both researchers into CS and reinforcement learning (RL), explain some of their key contributions to RL, how theoretical explorations have evolved into impactful applications, and more.
ACM Fellow Dawn Song Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, covers a myriad of topics around Agentic AI, including current and future security vulnerabilities from AI-powered malicious attacks, Dawn’s popular MOOC at RDI, and the associated AgentX-AgentBeats global competition.
Russ Cox, Senior Principal Engineer at State Street, Distinguished Engineer at Google details his journey from the Commodore 64 to Bell Labs, where he met Rob Pike (a co-designer of Go) and contributed to Plan 9 working alongside other legendary figures.

Listen to ACM ByteCast interviews here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Featured TechTalks

ACM members and non-members alike are welcome to attend our popular series of free TechTalks by expert industry professionals, distinguished ACM award laureates, and visionary researchers from industry and academia. Recent TechTalks include:

In "How to Extract Meaningful Insights from Data," Angelica Lo Duca, Researcher at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the National Research Council, Italy, presents a talk focusing on practical, accessible methods for guiding the transition from raw data to insights that inform decisions.
In "A Look at AI Security with Mark Russinovich," the CTO, Deputy CISO, and Technical Fellow for Microsoft Azure explores the evolving landscape of generative AI risks and safeguards, with a focus on large language models, fundamental vulnerabilities, how they can impact systems and users, and what strategies exist to mitigate them.

Find our entire archive of TechTalks here.

EDUCATION

Survey on First-Year Undergraduate Student Preparedness in CS

The ACM Education Board, in collaboration with the IEEE-CS Curriculum & Accreditation Committee, Computing Research Association (CRA), and the Computer Science Accreditation Board (CSAB), requests input from undergraduate computer science faculty on the preparedness of their incoming first year students for CS programs. The expected outcome of the survey is a set of recommendations for the computer science community. We invite undergraduate CS educators to participate in this important survey.

View on Demand: Ethical and Societal Impacts of GenAI in Comp Ed

A working group was convened at the ITiCSE 2025 conference and produced a report titled "Navigating the Ethical and Societal Impacts of Generative AI in Higher Computing Education." In this webinar, you will hear from the lead authors of that report with Tony Clear (Auckland University of Technology), Janice Mak (Arizona State University), Tingting Zhu (University of Toronto) and moderators Cara Tang (Portland Community College) and Paul Leidig (Grand Valley State University, retired). View the webinar here.

STUDENT NEWS

CRA Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship for Early Career Scholars

The Computing Research Association (CRA), with support from Microsoft, has opened applications for the CRA Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship for Early Career Scholars. This competitive, 12-month fellowship supports early-career computing scholars whose work integrates ethical, societal, and human-centered perspectives into AI research, particularly through interdisciplinary collaboration with the social sciences. Learn more here.

ACM Student Chapters Celebrate CSEdWeek and Inaugural Hour of AI

During Computer Science Education Week, December 8 to 14, 2025, 81 ACM student chapters took part in the inaugural Hour of AI. Building on over a decade of success with the Hour of Code, the new global initiative is designed to help students and educators everywhere take their first step into understanding and creating with AI. A list of ACM student chapters that organized took part in the 2025 Hour of AI activities can be found here.

Upcoming ACM Student Research Competitions: Submission Deadlines

ACM Student Research Competitions (SRCs) offer a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research at well-known ACM-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences before a panel of judges and attendees. The most recent SRC winners were presented at POPL 2026. The next conferences accepting submissions are:

SIGDOC 2026, October 3 - 9, 2026, deadline: March 13, 2026
PLDI 2026, June 15 - 19, 2026, deadline: March 30, 2026
SIGGRAPH 2026, July 19 - 23 2026, deadline: April 21, 2026
SOSP 2026, September 29 - October 2, 2026, deadline: June 12, 2026
ASSETS 2026, October 3 - 9, 2026, deadline: June 24, 2026
SPLASH 2026, October 3 - 9, 2026, deadline: June 26, 2026
ESWEEK 2026, October 4 - 9, 2026, deadline: TBD

CHAPTER NEWS

Welcome New ACM Chapters

Chapters are the "local neighborhoods" of ACM. The regional ACM Professional, Student, ACM-W, and Special Interest Group (SIG) chapters around the globe involve members locally in competitions, seminars, lectures, workshops, and networking opportunities. 49 Student and 10 Professional Chapters were started in Australia, Cyprus, Greece, India, Italy, Oman, Pakistan, Singapore, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and the United States.

ACM welcomes the new chapters that were chartered October 23, 2025 through January 21, 2026.

DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS PROGRAM

ACM Distinguished Speaker: Ann Blandford

Ann Blandford is Professor of Human Computer Interaction at University College London. She is a member of the ACM CHI Academy and is a recipient of an IFIP TC13 Pioneer Award. She is internationally known for her research in digital health and information science. Her lectures include "An Introduction to Human Factors for Health Technologies," "Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Interaction: Explorations in Healthcare," and more. For more information about Mandryk, please visit her DSP speaker information page.

All speakers are available through ACM's ACM Distinguished Speaker Program.

Join ACM on Substack

Want to keep up with what’s happening in computing? Our popular bi-weekly newsletter, "Advances in Computing," is now available on Substack, along with a brand-new newsletter for practitioners, "Queue: in Practice." Learn more here.

ACM CAREER & JOB CENTER

The Ultimate Career Development Destination

Connecting with the right employers in computing can be a daunting task. The ACM Career & Job Center is a true career planning destination. Whether you are seeking Career Insights, Career Advice, or Career Coaching, ACM can help.

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