ACM is celebrating the legacy of pioneering programmer Ada Lovelace with a month-long series featuring women who have contributed groundbreaking innovations and dedicated service to the computing profession.

To mark Ada's birthday, which this year is being observed on October 9, ACM recognizes the women who have made historic advances in the field and who are mentoring tomorrow's computing pioneers.

Visit the Ada Day page to learn more about women whom ACM has honored with our series of prestigious awards. 

Communications of the ACM has launched the China Region Special Section, the first in a series of regional special sections. The new section focuses on the China region and comprises 13 articles examining current computing and information technology trends in China, Macau and Hong Kong. The goal of the series is to build “an inclusive forum that spans the global community, with active participation from everyone, everywhere,” according to CACM Editor-in-Chief Andrew Chien. Special sections highlighting the leadership, unique characteristics and development of computing in each featured region will appear in selected CACM issues.

Sarita Adve of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been named the recipient of the 2018 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. Adve is recognized for her research contributions and leadership in the development of memory consistency models for C++ and Java; for service to numerous computer science organizations; and for exceptional mentoring. The award was presented at SC 18: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis.

Two research teams share the 2018 ACM Gordon Bell Prize: the Oak Ridge National Laboratory team for their work in combating opioid addiction, and a team affiliated with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for their work in applying AI to understanding climate change. The award was bestowed during the SC18 supercomputing conference.

For one week in December, millions of students around the world are introduced to the magic of computer science through games, coding puzzles, tutorials, and many other fun activities. Events are organized by local volunteers from schools, research institutions, and other groups. ACM helped launch Computer Science Education Week in 2009, and invites you host an Hour of Code in your community.

ACM has named 49 Distinguished Members for outstanding contributions to the field. The 2018 ACM Distinguished Members are exemplars for their peers, and represent ACM’s worldwide geographic reach, as well as the exciting range of subdisciplines that constitute today’s technology landscape. The ACM Distinguished Member program recognizes up to 10 percent of ACM worldwide membership based on professional experience and significant achievements in computing.

The ACM Charles P. "Chuck" Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award celebrates the late pioneer's contributions in computing and his inspirational mentorship of generations of computer scientists, by recognizing individuals with the same out-of-the-box thinking and “can-do” approach to solving the unsolved that Thacker exhibited. Financial support for the $100,000 prize is provided by Microsoft. Nominations will be accepted through January 15, 2019.

ACM Fellow and Athena Lecturer Deborah Estrin has been named a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. She was cited for designing open-source platforms that leverage mobile devices and data to address socio-technological challenges such as personal health management. Estrin is an Associate Dean and professor in Cornell Tech's Computer Science department, and is founder of the Health Tech Hub at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute and co-founder of the nonprofit startup Open mHealth.

Gabriel H. Loh is a Fellow Research Engineer at Advanced Micro Devices, where he is a key technical leader on teams that developed research projects for the US Department of Energy, including PathForward exascale. He was Co-General Chair of ISCA 2016, and serves on other ACM conference committees. For his contributions to die-stacking technologies in computer architecture, Loh received the SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award in 2018, and was named a 2017 ACM Fellow. He is also an ACM Distinguished Speaker.

Proceedings of the ACM (PACM) is a journal series that launched in 2017. The series was created in recognition of the fact that conference-centric publishing disadvantages the CS community with respect to other scientific disciplines when competing with researchers from other disciplines for top science awards and career progression, and the fact that top ACM conferences have demonstrated high quality and high impact on the field. See PACMs on Programming Languages, Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems, and HCI.

The 2018 Global Survey of Mathematical, Computing, and Natural Scientists needs people in mathematical, computing and natural sciences, including students, to share their career and educational experiences. The data being collected (through December 31) will include focused information about women in these fields. The survey is being conducted by The Gender Gap in Science project, funded by the International Council for Science, a collaboration of several organizations including ACM.

Researchers and practitioners at all phases of their careers (undergrad, PhD or postdoc) are encouraged to apply for the next Heidelberg Laureate Forum (September 22 to 27, 2019), for a chance to personally interact with laureates of the most prestigious prizes in mathematics and computer science, including the ACM A.M. Turing Award and the ACM Prize in Computing. Applications are due February 15, 2019.

Communications of the ACM introduces its “Regional Special Sections” with a look at the China region in the November issue of Communications of the ACM. In this inaugural feature, contributors from a wide range of academic and industry communities spanning the Chinese mainland, Macau, and Hong Kong provide an excellent snapshot of the most exciting computing trends and activities in the China region. The series includes short articles ("Hot Topics") that provide context and flavor of the region's distinctive growth, as well as longer articles that document some of the "Big Trends" shaping the computing landscape of the China region. In this video, Chen and Xiang-Yang Li discuss the China Region Special Section in the November 2018 CACM.

Written by renowned software engineers at some of the world’s most innovative companies, ACM Case Studies provide an in-depth look at how software teams overcome specific challenges by implementing new technologies, adopting new practices, or a combination of both. This installment examines code reviews -- a pervasive process which, in the case of a company the size of Microsoft, can constitute both an extensive and expensive time commitment. Here, Jacek Czerwonka, Michaela Greiler, Christian Bird, Lucas Panjer, and Terry Coatta discuss recent efforts at Microsoft to review their internal code review processes, and the effort to make this practice more beneficial for everyone involved.

ACM Queue’s “Research for Practice” is your number one resource for keeping up with emerging developments in the world of theory and applying them to the challenges you face on a daily basis. In this installment, Dan Crankshaw and Joey Gonzalez provide an overview of machine learning server systems. What happens when we wish to actually deploy a machine learning model to production, and how do we serve predictions with high accuracy and high computational efficiency? Dan and Joey’s curated research selection presents cutting-edge techniques spanning database-level integration, video processing, and prediction middleware. Given the explosion of interest in machine learning and its increasing impact on seemingly every application vertical, it's possible that systems such as these will become as commonplace as relational databases are today. 

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