The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest and most prestigious scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 100,000 as of 2011. Its headquarters are in New York City. ACM and the IEEE Computer Society are the primary umbrella organizations for academic and scholarly interests in computing.

Unlike the IEEE, however, the ACM is solely dedicated to computing.

Activities[link]

Two Penn Plaza site of the ACM headquarters in New York City

ACM is organized into over 170 local chapters and 35 Special Interest Groups (SIGs), through which it conducts most of its activities. Additionally, there are over 500 college and university chapters. The first student chapter was founded in 1961 at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Many of the SIGs, like SIGGRAPH, SIGPLAN, SIGCSE and SIGCOMM, sponsor regular conferences which have become famous as the dominant venue for presenting innovations in certain fields. The groups also publish a large number of specialized journals, magazines, and newsletters.

ACM also sponsors other computer science related events such as the worldwide ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), and has sponsored some other events such as the chess match between Garry Kasparov and the IBM Deep Blue computer.

Services[link]

ACM Press publishes a prestigious academic journal, Journal of the ACM, and general magazines for computer professionals, Communications of the ACM (also known as Communications or CACM) and Queue. Other publications of the ACM include:

• ACM XRDS, formerly "Crossroads" and renamed and designed in 2010, the most popular student computing magazine in the US.
• ACM interactions, an interdisciplinary HCI publication focused on the connections between experiences, people and technology, and the third largest ACM publication.^[1]
• A number of journals, specific to subfields of computer science, titled ACM Transactions. Some of the more prominent transactions include:
  • ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
  • ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
  • ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)
  • ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS)
  • ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)

Although Communications no longer publishes primary research, and is not considered a prestigious venue, many of the great debates and results in computing history have been published in its pages.

ACM has made almost all of its publications available to paid subscribers online at its Digital Library and also has a Guide to Computing Literature. Individual members additionally have access to Safari Books Online and Books24x7. The ACM also offers insurance, online courses, and other services to its members.

Digital Library[link]

The ACM Digital Library, a part of the ACM Portal, contains a comprehensive archive of the organization's journals, magazines, and conference proceedings. Online services include a forum called Ubiquity and Tech News digest.

ACM requires the copyright of all submissions to be assigned to the organization as a condition of publishing the work.^[2] Authors may post the documents on their own websites, but they are required to link back to the digital library's reference page for the paper. Though authors are not allowed to charge for access to copies of their work, downloading a copy from the ACM site requires a paid subscription.

Competition[link]

ACM's primary historical competitor has been the IEEE Computer Society, which is the largest subgroup of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The IEEE focuses more on hardware and standardization issues than theoretical computer science, but there is considerable overlap with ACM's agenda. They occasionally cooperate on projects like developing computing curricula.^[3] Some of the major awards in Computer science are given jointly by ACM and the IEEE-CS.^[4]

There is also a mounting challenge to the ACM's publication practices coming from the open access movement. Some authors see a centralized peer-review process as less relevant and publish on their home pages or on unreviewed sites like arXiv. Other organizations have sprung up which do their peer review entirely free and online, such as Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) and the Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology.

Membership grades[link]

In addition to student and regular members, ACM has several advanced membership grades to recognize those with multiple years of membership and "demonstrated performance that sets them apart from their peers".^[5]

Fellows[link]

The ACM Fellows Program was established by Council of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1993 "to recognize and honor outstanding ACM members for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM."

There are presently about 500 Fellows^[6] out of about 60,000 professional members.

Other membership grades[link]

In 2006 ACM began recognizing two additional membership grades. Senior Members have ten or more years of membership and demonstrated performance. Distinguished Engineers and Distinguished Scientists have at least 15 years of membership who "have made a significant impact on the computing field".

Chapters[link]

ACM has three kinds of chapters: Special Interest Groups,^[7] Professional Chapters, and Student Chapters. ^[8]

Special Interest Groups[link]

Professional Chapters[link]

As of 2011, ACM has professional chapters in 56 countries.^[9]

These chapters include:

• Baltimore ACM Chapter (BACM)
• Boston Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM (GBCACM)
• District of Columbia ACM Chapter (DCACM)

Student chapters[link]

As of 2011, there exist ACM student chapters in 38 different countries.^[10]

These chapters include:

Conferences[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2009)

The ACM sponsors numerous conferences listed below. Most of the special interest groups also have an annual conference. ACM conferences are often very popular publishing venues and are therefore very competitive. For example, the 2007 SIGGRAPH conference attracted about 30000 visitors, and CIKM only accepted 15% of the long papers that were submitted in 2005.

The ACM is a co-presenter and founding partner of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.^[15]

Awards[link]

The ACM presents or co-presents a number of awards for outstanding technical and professional achievements and contributions in computer science and information technology.^[16]

Leadership[link]

The President of the ACM for 2012–2014^[17] is Vint Cerf, an American computer scientist, who is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet". He is the successor of Alain Chesnais (2010-2012^[18]), a French citizen living in Toronto where he runs his company named Visual Transitions and Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton.

ACM is led by a Council consisting of the President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Past President, SIG Governing Board Chair, Publications Board Chair, three representatives of the SIG Governing Board, and seven Members-At-Large. This institution is often referred to simply as "Council" in Communications of the ACM.

Infrastructure[link]

ACM has five “Boards” that make up various committees and subgroups, to help Headquarters staff maintain quality services and products. These boards are as follows:

1. Publications Board
2. SIG Governing Board
3. Education Board
4. Membership Services Board
5. Professions Board

ACM-W: Association for Computing Machinery Committee on Women[link]

ACM-W, the ACM's committee on women in computing, is set up to support, inform, celebrate, and work with women in computing. Dr. Anita Borg was a great supporter of ACM-W. ACM-W provides various resources for women in computing as well as high school girls interested in the field. ACM-W also reaches out internationally to those women who are involved and interested in computing.

See also[link]

	Computer Science portal
	Computing portal

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• ACM portal for publications
• ACM Digital Library

Bryan Cantrill

Bryan M. Cantrill is an engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems and later at Oracle Corporation following its acquisition by Sun. He left Oracle on July 25, 2010^[1] to become the Vice President of Engineering at Joyent.^[2]

Cantrill was born in Vermont, later moving to Colorado, where he attained the rank of Eagle Scout. He studied computer science at Brown University, spending two summers at QNX doing kernel development. Upon completing his B.Sc. in 1996, he immediately joined Sun Microsystems to work with Jeff Bonwick in the Solaris Performance Group.

In 2005 Bryan Cantrill was named one of the 35 Top Young Innovators by Technology Review, MIT's magazine. Cantrill was included in the TR35 list for his development of DTrace, a function of the OS Solaris 10 that provides a non-invasive means for real-time tracing and diagnosis of software. Sun technologies and technologists, including DTrace and Cantrill, also received an InfoWorld Innovators Award that year.^[3] In 2006, "The DTrace trouble-shooting software from Sun was chosen as the Gold winner in The Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards contest."^[4] In 2008, Cantrill, Mike Shapiro and Adam Leventhal were recognized with the USENIX Software Tools User Group (STUG) award for "the provision of a significant enabling technology." ^[5]

Together with Shapiro and Leventhal, Cantrill founded Fishworks^[6], a stealth project within Sun Microsystems which produced the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems.

He is a member of the ACM Queue Editorial Board^[7].

Articles[link]

• Bryan Cantrill (2006-02-01). "Hidden in Plain Sight". ACM Queue 4 (1): 26–36. DOI:10.1145/1117389.1117401. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1117401. Retrieved 2012-02-01. 
• Bryan Cantrill, Jeff Bonwick (2008-09-01). "Real-World Concurrency". ACM Queue 6 (5): 16. DOI:10.1145/1454456.1454462. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1454462. Retrieved 2012-02-01. 
• Bryan M. Cantrill, Michael W. Shapiro and Adam H. Leventhal (2004-06-10). "Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems". Proceedings of the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. https://db.usenix.org/event/usenix04/tech/general/full_papers/cantrill/cantrill_html/. Retrieved 2012-02-01. 
• Bryan M. Cantrill, Thomas W. Doeppner (1996-08-15). "ThreadMon: A Tool for Monitoring Multithreaded Program Performance". 30th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) Volume 1: Software Technology and Architecture. http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/thmon/thmon.html. Retrieved 2012-02-01. 

References[link]

1. ^ Bryan Cantrill (2010-07-25). "Good-bye, Sun". http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/. 
2. ^ Bryan Cantrill (2010-07-30). "Hello Joyent!". http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/30/hello-joyent/. 
3. ^ Neil McAllister (2005-08-01). "DTrace and Predictive Self-Healing herald Sun’s future". InfoWorld. https://www.infoworld.com/print/17136. 
4. ^ Michael Totty (2006-11-11). "The Winners Are...". The Washington Post. http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115755300770755096-R2Ct41cQ4ZIPMwk4_xh0xU_HnQI_20061011.html. 
5. ^ "STUG Award". USENIX. 2008. https://db.usenix.org/about/stug.html. 
6. ^ Bryan Cantrill (2008-11-10). "Fishworks: Now it can be told". http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can-be-told/. 
7. ^ "ACM Queue Editorial Board". ACM. http://queue.acm.org/editorialboardx.cfm. Retrieved 2012-02-01. 

External links[link]

• "Bryan Cantrill's blog". http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/. 
• "DTrace Review". Google Tech Talks. 2007-08-15. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8002801113289007228. 
• "But why?". Have you ever kissed a girl? - Bryan Cantrill's famous response to Linux Kernel hacker David S. Miller. https://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.sun.hardware/msg/242387aeaa5b5456. 

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Zed Shaw
Shaw in Montreal, 2008
Website
http://zedshaw.com/

Zed A. Shaw is a writer, software developer, and musician, most commonly known for creating the Mongrel web server for Ruby web applications,^[1] as well as his unconventional and sometimes controversial articles on technology, business, and technical communities. His most famous and well-covered piece was his article called "Rails is a Ghetto",^[2][3] which has since been removed from his site.^[4]

Software[link]

Shaw is the original writer of the Mongrel web server for Ruby web applications (acknowledged by the creators of Ruby to be one of the first scalable Ruby web servers)^{[citation needed]}. Mongrel was the first web server used by Twitter, and inspired Node.js according to Ryan Dahl ^[5]. He has also created the Lamson mail framework, a Python framework for creating SMTP mail applications.^[6]

In 2009, Shaw opened Fret War, an online competitive community for guitarists and in 2010 released Mongrel2 (a language-agnostic successor to Mongrel using ZeroMQ and JSON as the foundation for an application-oriented web server).^[7]

Books[link]

In 2010, Shaw wrote and published Learn Python the Hard Way, a tutorial for the Python programming language. On June 24, 2011 Shaw released the second edition.

After the release of the second edition of Learn Python the Hard Way, Shaw began to write a tutorial for the C programming language, Learn C the Hard Way.

Speaking[link]

• Zed spoke at CUSEC 2008. His talk, The ACL is Dead, covers how to survive in a corporation while highlighting the shortcomings of ACLs.

References[link]

Links[link]

• Zed Shaw's homepage
• Zed Shaw's Starving Artist Ad Network
• Zed's Web Framework, Tir Web Framework
• [1]