ACM Awards banquet

Last night the annual ACM (Association for Computing Machinery, clearly a dated name) Awards banquet was held at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco.  This black-tie event has really come of age in the past decade, from a small beginning after many years of desultory awarding of the annual prizes at various conferences and workshops.

Kelly Gottlieb, who founded the ACM Canada chapter in 1949, has managed the Awards actitivites for ACM for the past 25 years.  Last night he gave an emotional farewell, with his  granddaughter and grandson in attendance ,and a tribute to Jim Hornung's memory, who co-chaired with Kelly for many years.  Kelly, 92 years young, got a standing ovation for his awesome dedication over the years.

The event was emcee'd by ACM CEO John White and ACM President Vint Cerf, notables in our field, and the entire night focused on the key 'infrastructure' contributions of many computer scientists, most of whom labor in relative obscurity except within their own community.   But their contributions have fueled the Information Age, and the myriad awards made note of the tremendous impact of these arcane contributions -- in databases, networks, communication methods, search techniques, architecturs, artificial intelligence, and cybersectuiry -- that we are all now beginning to take for granted.

What stood out for me was the clarity of how exciting this field seems at the moment.  It is well past the era of building the base layer of tools, and into the burgeoning application of those tools to problems of buisness, economics, sociology, organizational behavior, politics -- you name it, it's being changed.  And it is easy, as several at our table noted re MOOCs, to focus on the specifics and say "nothing is new in this field, yawn" while missing the context of the major adoption move.  Classic case of focusing on the trees and missing the forest.  It was somewhat painful to observe that while I usually have ridiculed others for this, I realized that here I'm guilty too.

ACM has historically been stingy (maybe I should say 'selective' or at least parsimonious) with their awards, preferring to give but a few to the MOST WORTHY rather than acknowledge teams or several contributors to a field.  I served on the Fellows committee for five years, and it was frustrating to note how few industrial contributors (vs. academics) were honored, as well as how scarce it was to find women or international contributors.  Thus, one year for example, we had 2 women and 26 men, and 4 industrial folk vs 24 academicians, and 3 internationals out of 28.   This year, by contrast, 52 Fellows were named: 17 (32%) were Int'l, so that was addressed well.  8 (15%) were from industry -- still very light; only 3 were women, worse than ever.

For the main awards, it was a somewhat different story  13 major awards were given, 9 of them to multiple folk.  A total of 26 winners in that set, 23 men and 3 women -- not much change, while 16 were academics and 10 were practitioners, a welcome shift in recognition.  7 were internationally based.   Even better, the 'newer awardees', for best dissertation and student research, had three women and five men.  So, I'd call it progress.

There are five co-sponsored awards with other societies -- these showed 7 men and 3 women, all academics.  This is still a predominantly male discipline, but as it becomes increasingly mathematically based, the evidence is good that it is attracting more women.

With respect to ACM Fellows, it is still a pretty exclusive group -- for a membership of 108,000 folk, 770 are current Fellows, with 52 more who are deceased.  And for a field of probably 2 million across the group, to single out less than 0.04% as Fellows is actually quite selective.  Listening to the feats at last night's fete, one can only concur that it takes some incredible talent to make this list today.

We are all benficiaries.