Stuart I. Feldman has been elected President of ACM for a two-year term beginning July 1, 2006. Feldman, who is Vice President for Computer Science Research at IBM, pledged to expand ACM's influence into the broader information technology fields worldwide. Also elected to two-year terms were Vice President Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and Secretary/Treasurer Alain Chesnais, Vice President for Product Development at Tucows Inc. of Toronto, Canada.

The election of ACM officers follows a two-year span of ACM's steady growth and involvement in technology issues that are driving innovation and competitiveness. This term included the release of ACM's Report on Globalization and Offshoring of Software, which assessed the rapid changes in global competition that are driven by Information Technology, and identified the keys to continued innovation and invention.

As part of his vision for ACM over his two-year term, Feldman cited the need to expand service to members around the world, including countries with rapidly growing populations of computing professionals. He also noted his interest in increasing ACM's influence on policy makers whose actions affect the broad computing community as well as society at large.

The winner of the 2003 ACM Software System Award for creating a seminal piece of software engineering known as "make," Feldman brings both corporate and academic experience to his role as ACM's highest elected officer. As an active ACM member and current Vice President, Feldman helped initiate several programs to serve the career and technical needs of practicing computing professionals, including engineers, architects, IT specialists and managers. He co-founded and sits on the Editorial Board of ACM Queue, an ACM publication that taps gurus, top guns, project heads and thought leaders to whom other programmers and engineers regularly turn for guidance. He also helped drive the effort to direct ACM's role in addressing key computing issues in China and India.

Wendy Hall, ACM's new Vice President, has emphasized the need for ACM to develop its international policies, programs and activities during her term. A supporter of initiatives to achieve greater diversity in the computing field, Hall currently chairs the newly formed Women's Forum of the British Computer Society. She is a former BCS president (2003 to 2004), and was recently appointed to the Scientific Council of the newly formed European Research Council.

Hall's research team developed the well-known Microcosm open hypermedia system, which was patented and spun off into a commercial company. Her current research interests include advanced knowledge technologies, the Semantic Web, and digital libraries. An active member of the Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web (SIGWEB) as well as the Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM), Hall was Chair of WWW2006, the World Wide Web conference, which is co-sponsored by ACM.

Alain Chesnais, ACM's new Secretary/Treasurer, has targeted the international arena as a key challenge for ACM, and is committed to helping ACM expand its role as an international organization. He has also advocated the expansion of ACM's online presence to better serve the needs of young researchers and practitioners.

Chesnais was ACM SIGGRAPH President from July 2002 to June 2005, and SIG Governing Board Chair from July 2000 to June 2002. A French citizen now residing in Canada, he has more than 20 years of management experience in the software industry. He joined the local SIGGRAPH Chapter in Paris some 20 years ago as a volunteer and has continued his involvement with ACM in a variety of leadership capacities since then.

Other new officers include Members-at-Large, who were elected to four-year terms:

• Bruce Maggs, Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Vice President, Research, Akamai Technologies, which he helped launch. He advocates greater effort towards serving the development community, sound scientific guidance on privacy, security and electronic voting issues, and increased investment in Computer Science research.
• Kevin Scott, Managing Staff Engineer, Search Quality at Google, and a member of the newly formed ACM Professions Board. His objectives are to help ACM focus attention on the K-12 computing community, and provide practitioner members with a strong community to support their needs as computing professionals.
• Jeannette M. Wing, President's Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and currently head of the Computer Science Department. Her vision is to improve K-12 math and science education, increase the international savvy of undergraduate and graduate students, and be vigilant in voicing the need for federal investment in long-term science and engineering research.

Saratov State University (Russia) 2006 World Champions

ACM President David Patterson said the results of the 2006 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) indicate that the best computer programmers from top-ranked US universities continue to struggle against stiff global competition.

The international competition, sponsored by IBM, took place April 12 at Baylor University in San Antonio, Texas, with 80 teams competing in the final round. The competition pitted more than 5,600 teams representing 1,733 universities from 84 countries against each other. The five top winners included programming teams from Saratov State University (Russia); Altai State Technical University (Russia); University of Twente (The Netherlands); Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China); and Warsaw University (Poland).

The only US university to finish in the top 20 was Massachusetts Institute of Technology at number 8. In addition, Princeton University clocked in at 28, followed by DePaul University at 29.

In response to the results, Patterson pointed to the urgent need to attract talented students to the Information Technology field, and to prepare them for the growing demand for IT jobs in the US. He cited improvements in the Computer Science curriculum and teacher preparation, as well as increased investment in basic research and development if the US hopes to keep its technological edge in the global economy.

"On the 30th anniversary of ACM's association with this international competition, the results show that educational policy and R&D investment are more important than ever for countries to stay competitive," said Patterson, professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of the Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems Laboratory (RAD Lab) at Berkeley.

Patterson challenged the widespread impression that IT jobs have declined in North America due to globalization and economic forces. This perception is viewed as a major factor in discouraging many students from entering the computer science field. He cited ACM's recent study, Globalization and Offshoring of Software, which identified the critical need for policies designed to improve a country's ability to attract, educate and retain the best Information Technology talent, and to foster innovation to remain competitive.

Patterson also noted that despite a significant increase in offshoring over the past five years, more IT jobs are available today in the US than at the height of the dot-com boom. In addition, he said the growing demand for computer skills makes it imperative that the US attract the best and the brightest to the computing field.

The final results of the contest are:

1st Place: Saratov State University
2nd Place: Jagiellonian University - Krakow
3rd Place: Altai State Technical University
4th Place: University of Twente
5th Place: Shanghai Jiao Tong University
6th Place: St. Petersburg State University
7th Place: Warsaw University
8th Place: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
9th Place: Moscow State University
10th Place: Ufa State Technical University of Aviation
11th Place: University of Alberta
12th Place: University of Waterloo

The 2006 ICPC World Champion team was honored at the annual ACM Awards Banquet in San Francisco on May 20. (See related story in this issue.)

Interaction with leaders in the graphics community, and interfacing with the newest graphics technologies, will lead the attractions at SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston from July 30 to August 3. The annual conference of ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques will feature panels, courses, an Emerging Technologies exhibition, and the perennially popular Computer Animation Festival.

Attendees can brainstorm with panel session leaders from industry, academia, and research on a range of hot topics, including digital rights and restrictions; ethics in image manipulation; the viability of a career in computer graphics; licensing and copyright; and responsible video game development.

Thirty courses, in the form of tutorials or half-day or full-day sessions, will explore the latest theories and practices in the art and science of computer graphics. Topics include illustrative visualization for medicine and science; enhancing perception in virtual environments; credible storytelling; and new special effects used in "The Chronicles of Narnia."

The Emerging Technologies exhibition will feature 36 interactive installations that allow attendees to experience applications from virtual open heart surgery to a forehead- mounted system for the blind that converts visual data to tactile electrical stimulation.

The Computer Animation Festival received a record number of submissions this year, up 25% from last year. From 726 entries, 97 were chosen for their exemplary use of computer-generated imagery and animation, and compelling storytelling. Ranging in scope from animation to video games, scientific visualization to artistic expression, the films will be shown throughout the conference.

Joe Rohde, Executive Designer and Vice President, Creative for Walt Disney Imagineering, will present the keynote address, "From Myth to Mountain: Insights Into Virtual Placemaking," on Monday, July 31. Rohde is the lead designer of Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park, and was the principal creative force behind the Expedition Everest attraction, which opened this year.

An estimated 25,000 computer graphics and interactive technology professionals from six continents are expected in Boston for SIGGRAPH 2006.

ACM's Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) is partnering with two IEEE societies and a design automation consortium to present DAC 2006, the premier forum for the electronic design industry, July 24 to 28 in San Francisco.

Session tracks on the hottest trends include system-level and embedded; low-power and thermal; analog and circuit; interconnect, reliability and DFM; verification and test; synthesis and FPGA; physical design; beyond the die; and new and emerging technologies.

New at this year's DAC will be many demonstrations involving multimedia, entertainment, and games, or "MEGa" applications. At the MEGa sessions, most of which will take place Wednesday, July 26, attendees can learn about design challenges for next-generation multimedia, games, and entertainment platforms from industry experts.

Keynote speaker Joe Costello, Chairman of Orb Networks, will pose the question, "iPod or Iridium: Which One Are You Going to Be?" on Monday, July 24.

More than 10,000 developers, designers, researchers, managers, and engineers from leading industrial and academic organizations worldwide, as well as more than 250 exhibitors, attend DAC each year.

In addition to SIGDA, DAC 2006 is sponsored by IEEE's Circuits and Systems Society and Computer Aided Network Design Technical Committee, and the Electronic Design Automation Consortium.

"If the hallmarks of an effective research enterprise are open collaboration; access to technology; and global talent… the US research enterprise hasn't fared well in the past four years."

By Cameron Wilson, Director, ACM Public Policy Office

Since September 11, 2001, the scientific community has often been on the losing side of an ongoing debate among US policymakers over the appropriate tradeoffs between openness and security. ACM, like many other scientific societies, acknowledges the need for adequate security, but cares deeply about fostering an open research environment, where the free flow of information and talent creates a diversity of views and stimulates new breakthroughs. In a sign that these arguments for openness are being heard, the US Department of Commerce last month pulled the plug on proposed new restrictions directed against foreign researchers working in the United States.

If the hallmarks of an effective research enterprise are open collaboration; access to technology; and global talent, where public and private facilities can attract the best people to solve the hardest problems, the US research enterprise hasn't fared well in the past four years. Policymakers have labeled more research as "classified;" installed a cumbersome visa process for foreign students and researchers; and passed the "Real ID Act," which is intended to increase the burden on foreigners who want to stay in the United States to obtain valid identification.

Last year, the US Department of Commerce proposed a regulation which further restricts foreign researchers working in the US. The proposal limits their access to "dual-use" technologies -- those with applications for both commerical and military use -- as well as access to basic knowledge such as technical manuals and related information, which are already widely available.

The proposal argued that a foreign national's country of birth, and not one's citizenship, should be the determining factor for applying this restriction. It set up a bizarre scenario where, for example, a Canadian researcher working in the US, who was born in Iran but lived her whole life in Canada, would have more restrictions than her "native" Canadian colleagues. Either scenario offers an ambiguous measure of a security risk, but where a person is born should have little bearing on his or her potential as a threat to national security.

The dual-use proposal drew the ire of the scientific community, high-tech industry and research universities. More than 300 organizations filed formal comments citing absurd results, significant burdens, and little tangible benefit if the proposal were to be accepted. ACM's US Public Policy Committee (USACM) called it ill-advised, arguing that it would have a chilling effect on research and development of new technologies in the US.

In a tacit admission that the proposal was fundamentally flawed, the Department of Commerce withdrew the proposal, saying, "it was a much sounder approach to actually think about the overarching policy and revisit basic assumptions and revisit objectives." In shelving its proposal, the Department of Commerce proposed a 12-member advisory committee with national security, corporate and academic participation to review the issue and recommend changes in current policies.

While it is too soon to say whether this step adequately addresses the government's growing tendency toward secrecy and restriction, it nevertheless appears to be a win for the scientific community and its preference for openness. It should stand as a sign that lawmakers are beginning to view security and open research systems as compatible rather than mutually exclusive goals.

For more information the proposal to change rules that apply to foreign nationals working in the US, and USACM's response, click on the Weblog, Proposed Export Rules Could Stifle Innovation

Barbara Simons, co-chair of USACM's Voter Registration Database Study, discusses technical challenges created by computerized voter registration databases.

In the wake of news headlines disclosing the government's growing involvement in surveillance and data collection, the 16th Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference (CFP 2006) convened in Washington, DC in early May to debate "Life, Liberty and Digital Rights." The attendees were welcomed by ACM CEO John White, who cited ACM's efforts in advancing computing as a science, and in assuring a robust computing profession that encourages technology innovation in a global environment. A recurring theme of the conference was the role of technology in determining the balance of privacy and security in the digital age.

In his opening remarks, keynote speaker Senator Patrick Leahy challenged the US Congress and the President to convene a high-level summit, with US citizens included, to debate the risks and rewards of surveillance. Senator Leahy noted that today's advanced technologies "change the way we understand privacy," and that Congress needs to improve its oversight of these potentially intrusive tools.

A leading advocate of open government, Senator Leahy painted a picture of a different America than he said was previously known. He asserted that security has become the touchstone of ever-widening measures to spy on law-abiding citizens, and he cited information databases and Internet communications as elements of a burgeoning challenge to privacy.

A provocative session entitled "Wiretap Victims" featured panelists James Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace, the first book on the super-secret National Security Agency; Mort Halperin, the ACLU's lead lawyer on wiretap issues in the 1970s; and Eric Lichtblau, the New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize in April for his stories on secret domestic eavesdropping. The session focused on the role of telecommunications companies in government surveillance, and the growing tension between privacy and public knowledge in the government's intelligence activities.

Barbara Simons, co-chair of USACM's Voter Registration Database Study, participated in a panel that addressed the technical challenges created by computerized voter registration databases. News reports indicate that these statewide systems, which were scheduled to be in place by January 2006, are proving difficult to implement. Panelists included Doug Chapin of Electionline.org, which published a report on the progress of election reform; Nikki Trella of the Maryland State Board of Elections, who managed Maryland's implementation; and Chris Clifton of Purdue University, a database expert and member of the USACM VRD Study.

Simons described the current situation in California, where widespread rejection of thousands of voter registrations has resulted from overly restrictive voter verification procedures, as "a disaster in the making." She said the guidelines in the USACM study, recommended by voting experts and computer scientists, were necessary to avoid the plight of California voters, and to assure accuracy, privacy, usability, security, and accountability in the registration process.

Other technology-related sessions included : "Net Neutrality: Possibility or Pie-in-the-Sky?"; "Blogging and Anonymity: An Oxymoron?"; "Technology, Democracy and Privacy Impacts on Hurricane Evacuees"; and "Cell Phone Tracking: We Know Where You Are." The conference also featured a keynote address by the US Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Policy, Stewart Baker, a well-known expert on technology issues and their impact on computing and security.

The conference included tutorials, plenary and concurrent sessions, and two nights of provocative Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. Highlights of the conference included the Big Brother Awards and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Awards, which recognize milestones as well as dubious distinctions in the online world.

The next CFP conference is scheduled to take place in Montreal in May 2007.

CHI 2006, the international conference on human-computer interaction, extended its core conference days to four this year, in an effort to fit in a new set of courses and embrace a wider community. The conference, which took place April 22 to 27 in Montreal, allowed designers, engineers, educators, behaviorists, and others from this diverse community to "Interact, Inform, and Inspire" each other.

Panels, papers, and workshops addressed topics as varied as mobile computing, haptics, personal information management, group behavior in online games, ubiquitous computing, information visualization, and designing for users with special needs.

Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit, delivered the opening plenary address, on innovation for creating breakthrough products. Scott McCloud, cartoonist and author of Understanding Comics, covered the evolution of digital comics as an art form in his closing plenary address.

The Interactivity Venue and alt.chi track gave attendees opportunities to experience and discuss interactive technologies.

SIGCHI's Vice President for Chapters, Apala Lahiri Chavan, organized a special pre-conference workshop for SIGCHI chapter representatives to discuss their activities and offer feedback on services and support from ACM and SIGCHI. "This year, the intention was to get the chapter leaders to discuss and present solutions to problems they face in their chapter organization work," she said. In attendance were representatives from chapters in Brazil; Switzerland; Toronto, Canada; Toulouse, France; The Netherlands; Czech Republic; Denmark; Philadelphia; and Boston, as well as a representative from the newly chartered SIGCHI student chapter at Pennsylvania State University.

CHI 2007 will take place April 28 to May 3, 2007 in San Jose, California. The conference is sponsored by ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI).

ACM's Special Interest Groups (SIGs) regularly cite outstanding individuals for their contributions in more than 30 distinct technological fields. Some recent honorees reflect the broad scope of computing achievements and the active efforts of several SIGs to acknowledge their members and advance their expertise.

SIGACT Gödel Prize, Service Prize, and Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award
ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) has awarded its 2006 Gödel Prize for theoretical computer science to a team of computer scientists who devised an elegant algorithm for testing whether a number is prime (that is, has no divisors except itself and one), a calculation used in cryptography and data security. Manindra Agrawal, Nitin Saxena, and Neeraj Kayla of the Indian Institute of Technology developed the AKS algorithm to solve one of the most ancient computational problems the world has faced. The award is sponsored by SIGACT and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). It will be presented at the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, July 9 to 16, in Venice, Italy. The Gödel Prize includes an award of $5,000.

The Gödel Prize for outstanding papers in theoretical Computer Science is named in honor of Kurt Gödel, whose work has had immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century. The award recognizes his major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of Computer Science.

The SIGACT Service Prize was awarded to Tom Leighton, co-founder of Akamai Technologies and Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT. Awarded biennially for outstanding contributions of service to the SIGACT community, the prize includes $1,000 and a $500 travel allowance.

The SIGACT Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award went to two authors: Anup Rao of the University of Texas, Austin, for "Extractors for a Constant Number of Polynomial Min-Entropy Independent Sources," and Jakob Nordstrom of the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, for "Narrow Proofs May Be Spacious: Separating Space and Width in Resolution." The award includes a prize of $500. The Best Paper Award was presented to Irit Dinur of Hebrew University, Israel, for her work, "The PCP theorem by Gap Amplification."

These awards were presented at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2006), held May 21 to 23 in Seattle, Washington.

SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award
Michael Wooldridge, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool, UK, is the recipient of the SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award, in recognition of his seminal contributions to the logical foundations of multi-agent systems, especially to formal theories of cooperation; teamwork and communication; computational complexity in multi-agent systems; and agent-oriented software engineering. SIGART is ACM's Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence. The award was presented at the fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS-06), held May 8 to 12 in Hakodate, Japan, and is funded by an endowment created by ACM SIGART from the proceeds of previous conferences.

SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement, Lifetime Service, Social Impact Awards
SIGCHI, ACM's Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction, presented its 2006 Lifetime Achievement, Lifetime Service and Social Impact Awards at the CHI 2006 conference, held April 22 to 27 in Montreal.

The Lifetime Achievement Award was given to University of Michigan HCI professors Gary and Judith Olson. Both were cited for their leadership in chairing CHI and CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) conferences, as well as serving on editorial boards of major journals. The award carries an honorarium of $5,000.

Susan Dray, a consultant with expertise in interface evaluation, usability evaluation, and contextual and ethnographic research, was honored with the Lifetime Service Award for her leadership, volunteering and committee work since the earliest days of SIGCHI. Dray was instrumental in building an interdisciplinary CHI community and continues to work for CHI, teaching tutorials, lecturing worldwide, and editing the Business column of the ACM magazine interactions.

Ted Henter, who dedicated himself to assistive technology after having been blinded in a motorcycle accident, received the Social Impact Award for his influential work in developing software that allows vision-impaired persons to use computers. His company Henter-Joyce (now a division of Freedom Scientific) created JAWS, then a DOS based program, which he later developed into a Windows version. Today, JAWS for Windows is the world's best- selling screen reading software, exceeding 78,000 users worldwide.

In addition to these awards, six individuals were named to the CHI Academy, an honorary group of individuals who have made extensive contributions to the study of HCI. Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Professor in Computer Science and Director of the Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique at Université Paris-Sud and CNRS, is also member-at-large of the ACM Council and member of the ACM Publications Board. Scott Hudson is a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the HCII PhD program. Hudson was a founding associate editor of ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction (TOCHI.) Hiroshii Ishii is Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he founded and continues to head the Tangible Media Group. Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman group, is one of the most prolific authors in the HCI field. Peter Pirolli is a Research Fellow at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and one of the most important theorists of HCI. George Robertson, an ACM Fellow, is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, working in the area of information visualization.

For more information on the awardees, see the SIGCHI awards page.

SIGMETRICS Achievement Award
SIGMETRICS, ACM's Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation, has honored UCLA Computer Science professor Richard R. Muntz with its Achievement Award, in recognition of his pioneering contributions to performance modeling, especially the landmark enabling of the modern theory of queueing networks. He also made fundamental contributions in the design and analysis of multimedia storage systems, spatial data indexing, and searching techniques for database systems. Muntz was a member of the ACM SIGMETRICS Board of Directors, General Chair of SIGMETRICS 2002 conference, an associate editor of the Journal of the ACM (JACM) and Editor-in-Chief of ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), and is an ACM Fellow. The award will be presented at the SIGMETRICS 2006 conference, June 26 to 30.

SIGMIS Magid Igbaria Outstanding Conference Paper of the Year Award
SIGMIS, ACM's Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems, has awarded its Outstanding Conference Paper of the Year Award to Margaret F. Reid, Myria W. Allen, Cynthia K. Riemenschneider, and Deborah J. Armstrong of the University of Arkansas, for their paper "Affective Commitment in the Public Sector: The Case of IT Employees." The award, presented at the SIGMIS Computer Personnel Research Conference (CPR 2006) on April 13 to 15 in Pomona, California, is named after the late Magid Igbaria, a researcher, professor, and prolific author in the Information Science field. The award includes a plaque and $250.

SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award
Daniel P. Siewiorek has been awarded SIGMOBILE's 2006 Outstanding Contribution Award for pioneering and fundamental contributions to wearable and context-aware computing. SIGMOBILE is ACM's Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing. The award was announced and presented on June 20 at the MobiSys 2006 in Uppsala, Sweden. Siewiorek is Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

The SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award is given for significant and lasting contributions to the research on mobile computing and communications and wireless networking.

SIGSOFT Outstanding Research, Distinguished Service, Most Influential Paper, Distinguished Paper Awards
SIGSOFT, ACM's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering, presented its awards on May 24 at the ICSE 2006 conference in Shanghai, China.

David Harel, a professor in the Department of Computer and Applied Mathematics at The Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, has received the Outstanding Research Award for his contributions to the development of software engineering as a discipline, which have had a deep and lasting impact on the software engineering research community. The award includes a $1,000 honorarium and up to $2,000 for travel expenses to the conference.

The Distinguished Service Award has been given to Carlo Ghezzi, Professor of Software Engineering the Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Italy, and an ACM and IEEE Fellow, for his years of dedication to the software engineering community. The award includes a $1,000 honorarium and up to $2,000 for travel expenses to the conference.

The Distinguished Paper Awards recognized two conference papers: "Who Should Fix this Bug?" by John Anvik, Lyndon Hiew, and Gail C. Murphy and "Model-Based Development of Dynamically Adaptive Software," by Ji Zhang and Betty Cheng.

"Our collaboration with CSTA is enabling us to identify and influence promising talent at a formative age." -- Buell Duncan, General Manager of Developer Relations, IBM

The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and the IBM Academic Initiative announced the release of three new resources for teachers to help high school students develop interest and skills in the burgeoning fields of Computer Science and Information Technology. This effort is part of CSTA's continuing mission to provide curriculum materials and other resources to teachers, and to communicate the importance of Computer Science education.

The three free resources include two learning modules for the classroom and one professional development tool for teachers. They provide much needed content for schools to improve the quality and number of Computer Science courses taught. The classroom learning modules offer high school students the rigorous coursework that can open the door to a variety of careers in technology that industry trends and occupational data show will be in great supply. The professional development tool enhances teachers' skills, giving them the resources they need to teach the ever-evolving and challenging discipline of Computer Science.

Chris Stephenson, Executive Director of the Computer Science Teachers Association, noted the importance of this kind of project in demonstrating that business and industry partners can play an important role in supporting Computer Science education and thus helping to ensure that students have the skills they will need to compete in an increasingly global economy. "This project really is the best example of how partnerships can work. IBM not only provided the funding for this project, but also provided us with experts who worked with our teachers to develop resources that would be truly classroom- and workforce-relevant for a broad array of students."

The resources include:

• Object Oriented Design Using Pong: Students learn Java programming concepts by implementing a version of the classic video game Pong. Includes lesson plans, worksheets, solutions and Java files.
• Web Page Design and Development: Introduces the basic principles of Web design to students who already have a basic understanding of the Web. Includes a comprehensive set of lesson plans and handouts.
• Project-Based Learning Model: Serves as a professional development tool and provides teachers with an overview of the project-based learning. It includes PowerPoint presentations, sample worksheets and templates, and links to additional readings.
  

"This work is critical to helping fill the pipeline with engineers, computer scientists and other professionals who will lead in the Innovation Economy," said Buell Duncan, General Manager of Developer Relations at IBM. "Our collaboration with CSTA is enabling us to identify and influence promising talent at a formative age."

The resources were classroom tested by pilot sites across the country, and designed to align with curriculum standards contained in ACM's Model Curriculum for K-12 Computer Science.

Shane Torbert, a teacher at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, was part of the pilot testing for the Object Oriented Pong resource. "The structure of the lessons encouraged students to think through the design of a computer program, from problem statement to solution," Torbert noted. "I have found the design process generally hard to teach, and these lessons helped ease my instruction."

ACM launched CSTA in 2005 to respond to the need to address a multitude of critical issues in K-12 Computer Science education, including the need for high-quality resources that reflect today's skills needs. The IBM Academic Initiative is an innovative program offering a wide range of technology education benefits to meet the goals of most colleges and universities.

The three resources will be distributed to teachers free of change via both the CSTA Web site and the IBM Academic Initiative Web site.

Amid spectacular mountain views, student Renat Khamidulin and coach Oleg Nasedkin from the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology hoist the ACM flag high.

The Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology Student Chapter of ACM recently went to great lengths (or rather, heights) to elevate ACM's name in the eyes of their fellow classmates.

On March 6, an intrepid group of four Moscow Institute students and their coach reached the Western summit of Mt. Elbrus, which at 5642.7 meters is the highest point in Europe, and planted a blue and white banner with the ACM logo in the snow. Along the way they braved storms, thin air, frostbite, and sparse accommodations.

They were also treated to spectacular views, and a rare sense of camaraderie from embarking on such an unusual project.

"We wanted to do something that would change people's perception of engineering," said Renat Khamidulin, chair of the student chapter, who is studying electronic design automation. "There are many faulty stereotypes about students who choose technical areas of study," for example, the notion that they are too immersed in their studies to be involved in extracurricular activities. "We are often too busy studying to tell people how fun our work can be, and that we can also have fun outside of the lab," he said. He noted that freshmen are choosing non-technical fields, in part because of this misperception.

Other goals of the expedition were to promote ACM among students, encourage interest in science and technology, pique interest in the IT community with an attention-grabbing activity, and show "the human side of engineering," according to Renat.

Renat's team members were Oleg Nasedkin, coach and MIET graduate; Alexander Vassiliev, a CS student studying databases; Eugene Barnaev, an EE student in design automation; and Shota Gotseridze, an EE student in hardware design.

The two main Western and Eastern Mt. Elbrus summits are about 11 km (6.8 miles) to the north of the Caucasus Main Range, which forms the border between Europe to the North and Asia to the South.

Visit the MIET ACM student chapter page to view a scrapbook of the students' adventure.

ACM award winners at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair: Huseyin Gurkan, Justin Solomon, Vidya Ganapati, Alex Buchanan, Liu Liu, and Nat Piyapromote, with Sandy Graham (third from right), ACM judge

ACM joined the more than 70 scientific, professional and educational organizations presenting special awards to the brightest young scientists from high schools around the world, at the 57th Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF), held May 7 to 13 in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The world's largest pre-college science fair drew nearly 1,500 students from 47 countries to compete for almost $4 million in scholarships and prizes. Student winners are ninth through twelfth graders who earned the right to compete by winning a top prize at a local, regional, state or national science fair.

In the Organizational Awards category, ACM bestowed awards for achievements in areas as diverse as image processing, face recognition, and music analysis.

First Place Award ($1,000):
Nat Piyapramote, 17, Sarasit Phithayalai School, Banpong, Ratchaburi, Thailand, "Statistical-Based Adaptive Binarization for Document Imaging." Nat also won an Intel ISEF Best of Category Fourth Place Award of $500.

Second Place Award ($500):
Alex Conway Buchanan, 18, Myers Park High School, Charlotte, North Carolina, "Stereovision Correspondence Using Wavelet Based Dynamic Programming."

Third Place Award ($300):
Liu Liu, 19, Shanghai Datong High School, Shanghai, China, "Facool: Convenient Internet Face Retrieval System."

Honorable Mention ($200):
Vidya Ganapati, 18, Sunset High School, Portland, Oregon, "Building a Power-Optimized MIPS Pipeline." Vidya also won an Intel ISEF Best of Category Third Place Award of $1,000.

Justin Moore Solomon, 18, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Tech, Alexandria, Virginia, "Three-Dimensional Face Recognition from Video: Facial Surface Reconstruction and Analysis Using Tensor Algebra and Differential Geometry." Justin also received an Intel ISEF Best of Category Second Place Award of $1,500 and an Honorable Mention in last year's ISEF.

Huseyin Alp Gurkan, 19, Galatasaray High School, Istanbul, Turkey, "Musical Instrument Recognition on Monophonic Musical Phrases."

These six winners also received complimentary ACM student memberships (which include the Student Portal Package and ACM's Digital Library) for the duration of their undergraduate education.

Science Service, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, founded and administers the ISEF. Intel became the title sponsor in 1998. In addition to prizes, ACM also supplies two judges for the Organizational Awards division; this year, they were Abbe Mowshowitz of the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center, and Sandra Graham of the University of Waterloo.

Next year's fair will be held May 13 to 19, 2007, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Queue July/August issue explores "The Transformation of Interfaces," including new display technology, biometrics, and new man/machine interaction models.

View the Queue editorial calendar.

Subscribe to Queue.





The Computers in Entertainment July/September issue interviews Danny Hillis and Bran Ferren of Applied Minds (formerly of Walt Disney Imagineering). Eight research papers will cover music entertainment, digital books, computer games, robotics, and human-computer interfaces, including haptics.

Subscribe to CIE.




The July/August issue of interactions is the first of two parts devoted to handheld gadgets. Part one focuses on design and HCI, while part two sheds light on technological and usability issues.

Subscribe to interactions.





In a new series of articles commemorating eLearn, magazine's fifth anniversary, e-learning innovators look back at five years of progress in their field while sharing their visions for the next half-decade.

ACM President David Patterson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), one of the highest honors in American science and engineering. The Academy's April 25 announcement recognizes honorees for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Patterson, professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the few computer scientists to achieve this recognition. On the previous day, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Patterson, who has served as president of ACM since 2004, joins the 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 16 countries for the NAS 2006 class. The NAS is a private organization of scientists and engineers established in 1863 to act as an official adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or technology.

The announcement by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences of the 2006 class includes 175 fellows and 20 foreign honorary members. Among the notables in this class are former Presidents George H.W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton; Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts; and many leading scientists and scholars from across the nation. Founded in 1780 by John Adams and other scholar-patriots, the Academy has elected the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation.

Patterson is the founding director of a new research center on the Berkeley campus, the Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems Laboratory (RAD Lab), which was announced in December 2005. RAD Lab will focus on the design of more dependable computing systems. It is underwritten by Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

During his tenure at ACM, Patterson has been a strong voice for increased funding of basic research and development from both public and private sources. He has also spoken out on the benefits to society of IT research, and the importance of improved educational instruction, increased scholarship opportunities, curriculum upgrades and teacher training and support for the nation's leadership in technology.

Patterson was appointed by President George W. Bush as a member of the President's Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow of both ACM and IEEE.

ACM continues to recognize and reward excellence in the computing field. Adding to the renowned ACM Fellows program of recognition for Professional members, ACM has created two new member grades:

Senior Member recognizes ACM members with at least 10 years of professional experience who have demonstrated performance and accomplishment that set them apart from their peers.

Distinguished Engineer, Scientist, or Member recognizes ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience who have demonstrated significant accomplishments or made a significant impact on the computing field.

Fellow, ACM's most prestigious member grade, recognizes the top one percent of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.

The criteria for candidates for each category will reflect the individual's professional and technical accomplishments:

Senior Member

• Five years of continuous Professional membership in ACM
• Ten years of professional experience
• Demonstrated performance that sets the member apart from peers
• Three endorsements from colleagues in the field (not necessarily ACM members)

Distinguished Engineer, Scientist, or Member

• Five years of continuous Professional membership in ACM
• Fifteen years of professional experience
• Significant accomplishment in, or a significant impact on, the computing field
• Four endorsements from colleagues in the field. Two of these endorsements must be from ACM members. It is recommended, but not required, that at least two of these endorsements be from ACM Fellows. Ideally, one of the four endorsements will be from a current or past employer or client.

Fellow

• Five years of continuous Professional membership in ACM
• No specific requirement for years of professional experience
• Outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community
• Five to eight endorsements from current ACM Professional Members - ideally ACM Fellows

All nominations for advanced ACM member grades must be made through the ACM website. Click on the links below for guidelines and forms:

Senior Members are self-nominating.

Distinguished Engineers, Scientists, Members can be self-nominating or may be nominated by a current ACM Professional Member.

Fellows must be nominated by an ACM Professional Member.

Deadlines
Senior Member nominations and endorsements must be received by August 31, 2006.

Distinguished Engineer, Scientist, or Member nominations and endorsements must be received by July 31, 2006.

Fellow nominations and endorsements for 2006 must be received by September 8, 2006.

Recognition
ACM Senior Members and Distinguished Members will receive a certificate and pins and a specially annotated ACM membership card. There will be an announcement on the ACM Web site and in Communications of the ACM listing the names of the Senior Members and Distinguished Members.

ACM Fellows will receive a certificate, a specially annotated ACM membership card and an ACM Fellow lapel pin. Their names will be listed in an issue of Communications of the ACM and a letter of recognition will be sent to the chief executive at the Fellow's place of employment. Formal induction ceremonies and presentation of Fellow certificates and pins will take place at the next annual ACM Awards Banquet.

Please send any questions you may have about the Senior Member, Distinguished Member or Fellows Programs to: Senior@acm.org; Distinguished@acm.org; or Fellow@acm.org.

ACM has launched its Member-Get-A-Member Recruitment Drive for 2006/2007. Current members are the ideal ambassadors to communicate the advantages of joining ACM to prospective members, and those who participate by telling friends and colleagues about ACM may be eligible for valuable gifts and special recognition.

When a referral joins, ACM emails the referring member and lets them know when they are eligible for a reward. Shortly after completion of the current Member-Get-A-Member Drive, the top qualifying recruiters will be recognized in ACM's member publications.

For the first referral who joins ACM, referring members will receive a gift, plus an additional gift for every other (third, fifth, etc.) successful referral. Gift selections include calculators, backpacks, stainless travel mugs and pocket notepads. For every tenth referral who joins, referring members receive a special bonus gift. Bonus gift selections include a free one-year ACM Professional or Student membership renewal, a laptop attaché bag, or Bushnell Powerview binoculars. Grand prizes, available for the top two recruiters, include an iPod and a digital camera.

Additionally, upon the completion of the campaign, members who submit ten or more names for referral will receive a Certificate of Appreciation for Service to ACM signed by ACM's President, suitable for framing.

The new Member-Get-A-Member Drive is on now and ends June 30, 2007.

For referral forms, recruitment tips and tools, prizes and rewards, and bonus gifts, visit the Member-Get-A-Member Drive page.

Danny Dig, from University at Urbana-Champaign, has won first place honors in the Graduate Division of the Grand Finals of ACM's Student Research Competition for his presentation, "Toward Automatic Upgrade of Component-Based Applications." The paper explores the practice of refactoring, or program transformations that change the structure of a program but not its behavior.

In the Undergraduate Division, Yuki Mori of the University of Tokyo took first place with her presentation, "Automatic Cross-Sectioning Using 3D Field Topology Analysis." Her paper proposes a method for automatically generating characteristic cross-sections from a given volume dataset. The visualization of volume datasets is important in many scientific fields, including geophysics and biomedicine.

Undergraduate and graduate student winners from four previous Special Interest Group (SIG) conference Student Research Competitions advanced to the Grand Finals. These winners were evaluated, via the Web, against one another by a panel of judges who determined three undergraduate and three graduate Grand Finals SRC winners. The Grand Finals winners, along with their advisors, attended the annual ACM Awards Banquet in San Francisco on May 20, where they were presented with awards and cash prizes. (See related story in this issue.)

The first SRC of the academic year was held at the SIGGRAPH conference in August 2005. The next competition was at MOBICOM in August/September 2005. The third SRC was held at the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications) (OOPSLA) conference in October 2005. The last SRC of the academic year took place at the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) conference in February 2006.

Originally, the SRC was only held once a year at the SIGCSE conference. Funding from Microsoft Research has expanded the number of competitions held each year, and has made possible the Grand Finals competition.

Here are the final results of the competition. For more information, please visit the Student Research Competition page.

2006 - Graduate Division

1. Danny Dig
   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
   Toward Automatic Upgrade of Component-Based Applications
2. Yaling Yang
   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
   Interference-aware Loop-free Routing For Mesh Networks
3. David Janzen
   University of Kansas
   Software Architecture Improvement through Test-Driven Development

2006 - Undergraduate Division

1. Yuki Mori
   University of Tokyo
   Automatic Cross-Sectioning Using 3D Field Topology Analysis
2. Scott Hale
   Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida
   Unsupervised Thresholding Morphological Processing for Automatic Fin-outline Extraction in DARWIN (Digital Analysis and Recognition of Whale Images on a Network)
3. Jeffrey Adair
   Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio
   Locating, Tracking, and Interpreting Ean-13 Bar Code Waveforms in a Two-Dimensional Video Stream
   

Future SRCs

More information on submitting posters to SRCs is on the SRC participation page.

SIGGRAPH '06 - July 30 - August 3, 2006 (submission deadline was May 11)

MOBICOM '06 - September 23 - 29, 2006, submission deadline: June 30, 2006

OOPSLA '06 - October 22 - 26, 2006, submission deadline: June 30, 2006

ASSETS '06 - October 23 - 25, 2006, submission deadline: July 14, 2006

SC '06 - November 11-17, 2006, submission deadline: July 31, 2006

Every four years, the Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC) assembles a spectrum of affiliated research conferences and workshops into a weeklong coordinated meeting. Next year's FCRC is scheduled for June 9 to 16, 2007, in San Diego, California.

FCRC aims to provide attendees with advantages of smaller conferences, while facilitating communication among researchers in different fields in Computer Science and Engineering. Each morning of the conference will begin with joint plenary talks on topics of broad appeal to the computing research community.

To date, 14 conferences have confirmed their participation in FCRC:

COLT 2007 - 20th Annual Conference on Learning Theory

CRA-W 2007 - Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Mentoring Workshop

EC 2007 - 8th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce

EXPERIMENTAL CS 2007 - Workshop on Experimental Computer Science

HOPL-III - 3rd ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference

IEEE Complexity 2007 - IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity

ISCA 2007 - International Symposium on Computer Architecture

LCTES 2007 - ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems

PLDI 2007 - ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

PADS 2007 - Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation Workshop

SIGMETRICS 2007 - International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems

SPAA 2007 - ACM Annual Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures

STOC 2007 - Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing

VEE 2007 - 3rd International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments

Though each conference's program is structured independently, participants will have a rare opportunity to attend tutorials, workshops, and technical sessions of co-located conferences outside of their own.

A Student Research Competition, as well as the annual ACM Awards Banquet, will take place at FCRC.

Summer is an ideal time for ACM Student Members to brush up on their skills and knowledge. Now through August 31, Student Members get full access to ACM's collection of 500 titles from the Safari® Enterprise Library, featuring a large selection from leading publisher O'Reilly. Click on the ACM Online Books Program to take advantage of this special opportunity.

Here's a sample of some of ACM's most popular Safari titles:

• Code Complete, Second Edition
• 10 Minute Guides to Getting Organized, Managing Time, and Project Management
• Designing Effective Database Systems
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
• Learning UML
• Ruby in a Nutshell
• Learning Python, Second Edition
• AI for Game Developers
• Eclipse Cookbook
• Linux Cookbook

(Students, please note that your current unlimited access to ACM's collection of 400 online books, powered by Books24/7®, remains unchanged.)

Safari Enterprise Library is a registered trademark of Safari Books Online, LLC. Books24x7 is a registered trademark of Books24x7, Inc.

A new report issued by the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) provides policymakers, educators, and business leaders with comprehensive strategies to ensure that Computer Science education plays a central role in the current national debate about America's competitiveness in the global economy.

This new report, which has been widely cited in recent education-related news stories, provides a checklist of steps to successfully implement a Computer Science education program. It also includes a "school-level reality check" for those responsible for implementing Computer Science education, and describes how to identify the intended outcomes of the curriculum.

Funded with support from the National Science Foundation, The New Educational Imperative: Improving High School Computer Science Education gathers important findings about Computer Science education. For example:

• Only 26 percent of US schools require students to take Computer Science courses, even though computers pervade nearly every aspect of our lives;
• Lack of time in students' schedules is cited as the reason for declining enrollment in high school courses; and
• Computer Science education is plagued by public misperceptions including students' thinking that it is all about playing video games and surfing the Internet.
  

SC06, the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, will convene November 11 to 17, 2006 in Tampa, Florida.

The Student Volunteers program is a great way for students to benefit from the conference by participating behind the scenes. Undergraduate and graduate student volunteers are needed to assist with the administration of the conference and will receive, in exchange, free conference registration, housing for out-of-town volunteers, and most meals. Student volunteers will have the opportunity to see and discuss the latest high-performance networking and computing technology and meet leading researchers from around the world while contributing to the success of this annual event.

For detailed information about the Student Volunteers program, including a link to the application form, please visit the student volunteers page.

Starting in January 2006, Queuecasts have been made available on the ACM Queue Web site via a downloadable file users can listen to on their computer or upload to their MP3 player. The 15- to 20-minute conversations focus on a particular topic relevant to the corresponding print issue for that month.

Leveraging the expertise of ACM Queue's Editorial Advisory Board, ACM Queue targets and recruits industry experts each month to participate in the Queuecast. The technology-focused questions are developed by the board and by moderator Michael Vizard, former editor-in-chief of CRN and co-founder of Attention Tech Media, who also interviews the subject or subjects for the Queuecasts.

Once the Queuecasts have been posted to ACM Queue's site, listeners immediately will have the ability to post their comments via a link located below the download link. Such comments will be readily available as a thread on the site for others to read. Queuecast guests also have the option to take part in the online discussion as they see fit. Depending on the nature of these discussions, ACM Queue may decide to print some or all of the online discussions in a future issue. In addition, the Queuecasts will be archived in and accessible from ACM's Digital Library.

Editorial calendar of topics for Queue for the remainder of the year:

July/August 2006: Risk & Compliance in Enterprise Computing
September 2006: Component Technologies
October 2006: Application Deployment and Management: The Next Generation
November 2006: Fighting Organized Crime
December 2006: Revolutions in Computer Architecture

To help graduating students make the transition to their professional careers by providing continuous learning opportunities, ACM offers a special ACM Professional Membership at the low rate of $49 USD (regularly $99). This one-year-only transition rate for recent graduates includes all the benefits of Professional Membership. An optional one-year only Digital Library subscription can be added for an additional $50.

Transitioning to ACM Professional Membership provides access to:

• Nearly 1,000 free online books, including a large selection from Safari featuring O'Reilly and many others
• 1,200 free online course titles from leading provider Thomson NETg
• ACM's email digests TechNews and CareerNews
• ACM's flagship publication Communications of the ACM, in print and online
• A free "acm.org" email forwarding account with Postini spam filtering
• A professional network of nearly 80,000 fellow ACM members
• A free subscription to ACM Queue magazine, plus Queuecasts, downloadable discussions with technology experts