ACM MemberNet Europe

June 2021

CONTENTS AT A GLANCE:

WELCOME FROM THE CHAIR
MEMBER RECOGNITION: Advanced Member Grades Congratulations and Call for Nominations
RESEARCH: ACM Europe Forms RAISE, New Working Group on Research
ELECTION: 2021 ACM Europe Council Election
TECH POLICY: ACM Europe Policy Group Provides Input on Three EC/EP Proceedings
EDUCATION: Informatics for All Update
ACM-W EUROPE: womENcourage 2021 Call for Participation
AWARDS: Recent Best Paper Awards Given at Conferences
SUMMER SCHOOLS 2021: Upcoming ACM Europe Council Summer Schools—Mark the Date
STUDENT NEWS: Upcoming ACM Student Research Competitions
ACM DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS PROGRAM: Seeking New Distinguished Speakers

WELCOME FROM THE CHAIR

Dear European Researcher, Practitioner, Educator,

I would like to inform you about the ACM Europe Council goals and welcome you to the world of ACM Europe. The ACM Europe Council aims to promote dialogue and the exchange of ideas on technology and computing policy issues between the European Commission and other governmental bodies and funding agencies in Europe, and the informatics and computing communities. It also aims to foster education in the computer science field in Europe, to award and disseminate the achievements of European computer professionals, to support gender equality in the European computing landscape, and to promote access to the computer-related scientific frontiers.

One of the priorities of the Council is to enhance European research visibility and give credit to distinguished European researchers. To this end, the Council has established two new working groups. The first is the ACM Europe Fellows Working Group, whose goal is to ensure the elevation of excellent European ACM members to the ACM Fellow and Distinguished Member grades. The second is the ACM Europe Research Visibility Working Group (RAISE), which aims at increasing visibility of European research excellence, collaborating with ACM structures (including its Special Interest Groups) to promote research activity in Europe, and creating new opportunities and informing European researchers about existing opportunities within ACM for receiving credit for their professional achievements. To fulfill the vision of these working groups, I encourage all European researchers, educators and practitioners to consider their nomination to the ACM Advanced Member Grades and/or to apply for one of the ACM awards. If you are an ACM Fellow already, we hope you will consider acting as a nominator yourself. (See relevant calls below.)

Another priority of the Council is to strengthen participation of European young scientists in various ACM activities. To this end, the Council has established two series of ACM Europe schools, on Data Science and on HPC Architectures for AI and Dedicated Applications, which have been very successful, acting as model educational events in their fields in Europe. The Council is seeking to organize more events for European students and young professionals in the future.

In addition to the activities described above, major activity has been carried out by the Council’s Standing Committees (ACM Europe Technology Policy Committee (TPC), Committee of European Chapter Leaders, ACM-W Europe) and its working groups, and by Informatics for All.

We hope you will find our activities as exciting as we do. As the Council aims at encouraging greater participation of Europeans in all dimensions of ACM, I invite all of you to participate in any of the Council’s activities. Some of the opportunities for contributing are described below.

ACM Europe TPC has a constantly open call for recruiting members for its four working groups which focus on the following areas: 1) Climate Change, 2) Smart Cities, 3) Artificial Intelligence, and 4) Autonomous Systems. If you have expertise in any of the above areas, you are very welcome to express your interest for joining these working groups. For doing so, please send an email to Chris Hankin ([email protected]), Chair of the ACM Europe TPC.

To contribute to the activity of ACM Women Europe, visit https://acmweurope.acm.org/volunteers.

To increase the level and visibility of ACM activities across Europe, encourage greater participation of Europeans in all dimensions of ACM, and provide timely information about opportunities for further recognition of the work and the achievements of European researchers (e.g. through the ACM Awards programme, etc.), the Council is currently beginning to enhance its networking and communication strategy, and to establish links and mechanisms for improving flow of information regarding such opportunities to our members. I welcome your contribution to these initiatives. To express your interest, please send me an email.

We at the ACM Europe Council hope that this letter will serve as a starting point for initiating a dialogue with the ACM Europe community. Toward this end, we invite you to share your success stories with us, contribute to our activities, let us know your expectations from ACM Europe, and send us your comments and suggestions regarding our activities.

Sincerely,

Panagiota Fatourou
FORTH ICS and University of Crete, Greece
Chair, ACM Europe Council
[email protected]

MEMBER RECOGNITION

Our Warmest Congratulations to ACM Europe Members Who Were Recently Elevated to an Advanced Member Grade

The Council is proud to announce that 16 European researchers became ACM Fellows and five more researchers became ACM Distinguished Members in 2020.

We are also excited to announce that the number of successful nominations for ACM Senior Members from Europe went up by an order of magnitude in the previous nomination cycle: 115 European researchers became ACM Senior Members in 2020.

The ACM Europe Council is thrilled to see that more European researchers are receiving the recognition they deserve for their professional achievements. The Council is committed to continuing our efforts in this direction.

Our warmest congratulations to all of you who joined the network of ACM Europe Advanced Member Grades! We hope that you are willing to contribute to the Council's endeavour to enhance visibility of European research by considering acting as a nominator yourself in the future.

ACM Advanced Member Grades—Call for Nominations

The ACM Europe Council would like to draw your attention to the upcoming deadlines for ACM Senior Members, ACM Distinguished Members, and ACM Fellows nominations, which are on 3 September, 1 August, and 7 September, respectively. The Council would like to encourage you, depending on the level of your seniority, to consider your nomination for one of these member grades.

The Senior Member Grade recognizes ACM members with at least 10 years of professional experience who have demonstrated performance through technical leadership and technical or professional contributions. Click here for nomination information, online nomination form and FAQs.

The ACM Distinguished and Fellow member grades are not self-nominated (so researchers may only be nominated by their colleagues). We hope that you would be willing to join forces with us in achieving the Council's goals by acting as a nominator for researchers who could be highly promising candidates for these grades.

The Distinguished Member Grade recognizes those ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field. ACM Fellow is ACM's most prestigious member grade, recognizing the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.

Candidates for all member grades must have at least 5 years of Professional Membership within the last 10 years. More information can be found on the Distinguished Member and Fellow nomination sites.

You may also find it useful to have a look at the Informal Guide to ACM Fellow Nominations, which provides advice and suggestions for nominations and endorsements.

Read also ACM Past President and former ACM Awards Committee Chair Cherri Pancake's article in Communications of the ACM, "Dispelling Common Myths about ACM Awards and Honors."

RESEARCH

ACM Europe Forms RAISE, New Working Group on Research

The ACM Europe Council has a strong commitment in promoting European research, and it would like to see more European researchers receiving recognition for their professional achievements. To achieve these goals, the Council has recently established the ACM Europe Research Visibility Working Group (RAISE), whose mission is to achieve greater visibility for European research and ensure a higher degree of recognition for the accomplishments of European Researchers within the scope of ACM.

The ACM Europe Council is proud to announce the RAISE members:

Rosa M. Badia, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Université Paris-Saclay, France
Liliana Dobrica, University Politechnica of Bucharest, Romania
Panagiota Fatourou, FORTH and University of Crete, Greece (Chair)
Valerie Issarny, INRIA, France
Georgia Koutrika, Athena Research Center, Greece
Christian Pilato, Politecnico di Milano, Italy (Secretary)
Alejandro Saucedo, The Institute for Ethical AI, UK
Marc Shapiro, Sorbonne-Université and INRIA, France
Per Stenström, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Sabine Susstrünk, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Contact Liaison:
Panagiota Fatourou
Chair, ACM Europe Council
Email: [email protected]

ELECTION

2021 ACM Europe Council Election

The 2021 ACM Europe Council Election is now open. All Professional Members of ACM who reside in Europe and were in good standing as of 3 May 2021 are eligible to vote in the election. The voting site closes on 18 June 2021 at 16:00 UTC.

The slate of candidates is listed below:

Rosa M. Badia
Tom Crick
Yannis Ioannidis
Valerie Issarny
Manuel V. Hermenegildo
Bran Knowles
Panagiotis "Panos" Papadimitratos
David Peleg
Leonel Seabra Sousa
Rute C. Sofia

The 2021 ACM Europe Council Election is being conducted by Election Services Corporation (ESC). All eligible Professional Members of ACM who reside in Europe were sent voting information from ESC on 18 May 2021. If you have not received email from ESC, contact: [email protected].

TECH POLICY

ACM Europe Policy Group Provides Input on Three EC/EP Proceedings by Chris Hankin, Chair, ACM Europe Technology Policy Committee

ACM’s Europe Technology Policy Committee (Europe TPC) recently provided input on three significant proceedings in the European Commission and the European Parliament.

In response to the Commission’s formal consultation on the new Digital Services Act (DSA), which would redefine the obligations of online content platforms to identify and remove disinformation subject to audit by “vetted researchers,” the Comments filed offered two key observations:

"[t]he success of the DSA will depend upon the ability of platforms and other regulated entities to successfully deploy automated content moderation system. ...[Accordingly, their] “inherent limitations and biases ... must be fully understood and appropriately safeguarded against in legislation if such systems are to be used to maximum and accurately predictable effect;” and

“large numbers of otherwise qualified researchers should not inadvertently or by design be prevented from qualifying as ‘vetted researchers’ by overly restrictive or imprecisely drafted provisions governing the secure storage of platform data received.”

The Committee also submitted a formal Statement on the Development and Deployment of Digital Green Certificates to the Chair of the European Parliaments' Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) prior to its hearing on the European Commission’s Proposal regarding “Digital Green Certificates.” European authorities are currently and rapidly attempting to develop an internationally interoperable travel document in both paper and electronic form before the upcoming European holiday season. The Europe TPC Statement recommends that the European Union:

Work with the World Health Organization to develop an international Public Key Directory (PKD), rather than an EU standard;
Develop Certificate technology and policy to ensure that information disclosure is proportionate to the immediate need for that information;
Prioritize the protection of EU citizens from “data inference;” and
Maximally limit Certificate data retention.

This Statement was also shared with the Chair of the intra-Parliament Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel, with which Europe TPC is seeking to establish an advisory relationship.

Responding to an invitation from the European Parliament, members of the Committee wrote an in-depth white paper on Gender Bias in Automated Decision Making (ADM) Systems. The paper focuses on how discrimination resulting from the use of machine-learned ADM systems may impact gender equality in STEM. It aims at revealing gender bias in artificial intelligence technology used for initial screening and recruitment, gender bias in the targeting of job advertisements, and bias in software that could introduce obstacles to the career progression of women. The paper also stresses the necessity and urgency of addressing the underrepresentation of women in AI industry. More significantly, it provides recommendations regarding gender bias from technical, ethical, legal, economic, societal and educational perspectives.

If you would like to get involved with the Committee, please contact the Chair ([email protected]) with a brief CV and statement of areas of interest.

EDUCATION

Informatics for All Update

The Informatics for All (Inf4All) Steering Committee, chaired by Dame Wendy Hall (University of Southampton, UK), currently comprises four member organisations: ACM Europe; the Education Committee of the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS); IFIP's Technical Committee 3 on Education; and Informatics Europe. Inf4All aims at getting academia, industry, government and society together to influence education policy in Europe. It seeks to provide support to the European Commission in terms of advancing informatics education and monitoring and engaging in developments involving the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) as OECD prepares for its next assessment of science education.

The following two topics have dominated the recent discussions in Inf4All.

Informatics Curriculum Framework. Education is a devolved matter within Europe, as all countries and educational regions develop their own curricula demonstrating great diversity across Europe. To support the advancement of informatics education in Europe, Inf4All has set up a group of eight members, including two representatives from each of the four member organisations, to produce an Informatics Curriculum Framework. The Framework will serve as a higher-level document than a curriculum document, aiming to offer guidance and challenge to educational organizations designing informatics curricula.

Inf4All is running the first stage of the framework development, which includes the production of an interim report to be distributed to key stakeholders for comments. Inf4All envisions the broad support of the produced framework.

Educating Teachers. The education of teachers within Europe is another important topic in which Inf4All aims to have some input in the future. Inf4All has consulted with key figures from the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and the BCS Academy of Computing, through which valuable input has been gained. Consideration is currently being given to organizing a workshop where teacher education would form the main agenda item. Another matter relating to this, and causing some reflection, is the standing that Informatics typically has within the broader school curriculum.

ACM-W EUROPE

womENcourage 2021 Call for Participation

WomENcourage 2021 will take place virtually (coordinated from Prague, Czech Republic) 22-24 September 2021. This year, it is celebrating all attempts to bridge communities to foster innovation: bridges built across boundaries of disciplines, boundaries between industry and academia, and boundaries among homogeneous communities, inviting individuals of all genders, nationalities and ages to co-create together. The community behind the scenes of womENcourage 2021 is Czechitas. Learn more about how to get involved.

ACM-W Europe is looking for proposals to host womENcourage 2023. The proposal process includes two phases:

Expressions of Interest (EoI) to be submitted no later than 17 June 2021 23:59 AoE, but earlier submissions are welcome and indeed highly recommended. Submitting an EoI does not constitute a firm commitment to hosting. It is a first step toward a conversation with ACM-W Europe that will help interested parties navigate the process of applying to be a host venue, by thinking early about what they need to have in place to fulfill the requirements to host the event. Notification of successful EoI proposals will be communicated via email by 2 July 2021.

Full Hosting Proposals to be submitted by 12 August 2021 23:59 AoE. Notification of the final decision on 1 October 2021.

Click here for full information on the proposal process. Read more news from ACM-W Europe here.

AWARDS

Recent Best Paper Awards Given at Conferences

Since 2016, the ACM Europe Council has sponsored Best Paper Awards recognizing authors of outstanding technical contributions to ACM conferences taking place in Europe. Every ACM conference that takes place in Europe in the award year is eligible to bestow a conference paper award. The recipient of the award is chosen based on the evaluation criteria determined by the International Program Committee of each participating conference. Each of the authors of the best paper receives a plaque. In addition, there is a 1,000-euro honorarium to be split among the co-authors. The recipient's paper is provided online through the ACM Europe Council Awards page. All expenses related to the award are covered by the ACM Europe Council.

For this fiscal year, the following seven conferences were selected in chronological order:

ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS 2020)
17th ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production (CVMP 2020)
16th EuroSys Conference 2021
43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2021)
13th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS 2021)
Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2021)
ACM Conference on Web Science (WebSci 2021)

The ACM Europe Council congratulates those who received the awards.

SUMMER SCHOOLS 2021

Upcoming ACM Europe Council Summer Schools: Mark the Date

Europe Summer School on HPC Computer Architectures for AI and Dedicated Applications. The 2021 edition will be fully remote. The school will take place 30 August to 3 September, and it will be hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS). Lectures will cover state-of-the- art architectures and software stacks for AI, and the design of RISC-V vector accelerators.

Europe Summer School on Data Science. The school will be a different experience from the first three events in two important dimensions: it will be shifted by a few months and will take place in the autumn; and it will be completely virtual. On two other dimensions, however, it will follow the traditions established in previous years. It will feature expert scientists as lecturers, presenting some of the many aspects of the diverse field of data science, and it will be hosted by the Athena Research Center and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Its social program will not be able to match that of a physical meeting in the middle of the Athenian summer, but it will include several innovative activities bringing students and lecturers close together.

STUDENT NEWS

Upcoming ACM Student Research Competitions

The ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), sponsored by Microsoft, offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research before a panel of judges and attendees at well-known ACM-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences.

Recognising the value of student participation at conferences, ACM started the program in 2003, but it is much more than just a travel funding program. The ACM SRC provides participants a chance to meet other students and to get direct feedback on their work from experts.

The following conferences are accepting submissions:

MODELS 2021, 10-15 October, deadline 12 June
ICFP 2021, 22-27 August, deadline 25 June
SOSP 2021, 25-28 October, deadline 30 July

ACM DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS PROGRAM

Seeking New Distinguished Speakers

The Distinguished Speakers Program (DSP) is an outreach program of ACM that brings distinguished speakers from academia, industry, and government to give presentations to ACM chapters, members, and the greater IT community in a variety of venues and formats.

ACM Distinguished Speakers are renowned thought leaders, capable of speaking about the most important topics in computing today. The ACM Europe Council encourages European researchers (depending on their level of seniority) to consider nominating themselves to be ACM Distinguished Speakers.

The ACM Distinguished Speaker Program could be an excellent solution for:

Corporations that may be interested to educate their technical staff, ramp up the knowledge of their working teams, and give employees the opportunity to have their questions answered by experts in their field.

Colleges and universities that want to expand the knowledge base of their students with exciting lectures and provide a chance to engage with a computing professional in their desired field of expertise.

Event and conference planners who may consider using the ACM's Distinguished Speakers to help find compelling speakers for their events and reduce the costs in the process.

ACM local chapters that aim to boost attendance at their chapter meetings with live talks by ACM Distinguished Speakers and keep the chapter members informed of the latest industry findings.

We invite all our members, as well as ACM Europe chapters, to make the most of the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program.

ACM MemberNet Europe covers news of people and activities of the ACM Europe Council.