The ACM constitution provides that our Association hold a general election in the even-numbered years for the positions of President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer, and Members-at-Large. Biographical information and statements of the candidates appear on the following pages (candidates’ names appear in random order).
In addition to the election of ACM’s officers—President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer—two Members-at-Large will be elected to serve on ACM Council. The 2022 candidates for ACM President, Yannis Ioannidis and Joseph A. Konstan, are working together to solicit and answer questions from the computing community! Pose your questions and view responses at: https://tinyurl.com/acmelection2022.
Electronic Balloting Procedures. Please refer to the instructions posted at https://vote.escvote.com/acm.
Please note the election email will be addressed from acmhelp@mg.electionservicescorp.com.
Paper Ballots. Should you wish to vote by paper ballot please contact Election Services Co. to request a paper copy of the ballot and follow the postal mail ballot procedures: acmhelp@electionservicescorp.com or +1-866-720-4357.
Postal Mail Ballot Procedures. Please return your ballot in the enclosed envelope, which must be signed by you on the outside in the space provided. The signed ballot envelope may be inserted into a separate envelope for mailing if you prefer this method.
All ballots must be received by no later than 16:00 UTC on 23 May 2022.
The ACM Elections Committee will validate the computerized tabulation of the ballots. Validation by the Elections Committee will take place at 14:00 UTC on 25 May 2022.
ACM ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
Hemangee Kapoor
Gerald Segal
John White
Candidates for PRESIDENT
(1 July 2022 – 30 June 2024)
YANNIS IOANNIDIS
Professor of Informatics & Telecommunications
University of Athens
Greece
Yannis Ioannidis is Professor of Informatics & Telecom at the U. of Athens, Greece (since 1997). Prior to that, he was a professor of Computer Sciences at the U. of Wisconsin-Madison (1986-1997). He has also served as the President and General Director of ATHENA, the only Research & Innovation Center in Greece focusing exclusively on information technologies (2011-2021).
He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (U. of California-Berkeley), an MSc in Applied Mathematics (Harvard U.), and a Diploma in Electrical Engineering (Nat’l Technical Univ. of Athens).
His research interests include database and information systems, data science, data and text analytics, scalable data processing, recommender systems and personalization, and digital storytelling. His work is often multidisciplinary, motivated by problems that arise in the Life, Physical, or Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts. He has published over 160 articles, holds three patents, and has co-founded one start-up based on the results of his group’s research.
Ioannidis is an ACM and IEEE Fellow (essentially both “for contributions to database systems, particularly query optimization”), a member of Academia Europaea, and a recipient of several research and teaching awards, including Presidential Young Investigator, UW Chancellor’s Teaching Award, VLDB 10-Year Best Paper, and Xanthopoulos-Pnevmatikos Award on Outstanding University Teaching (presented by the President of Greece).
He has been leading OpenAIRE, the open access infrastructure in Europe, for over a decade, and he serves on the Advisory Board of the new Destination Earth Initiative, the Exec Board of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures, and the steering committee of the IEEE Int’l Conf. on Data Engineering.
An ACM member since 1983, he has served as ACM Secretary/Treasurer (2018-2020), SIGMOD (SIG on Management of Data) chair (2009-2013) and vice-chair (2005-2009), and as a member of the ACM Europe Council, the SIG Governing Board Exec Committee, and the ACM Publications Board. Currently, he serves on the ACM Digital Library Board, is an associate editor of CACM, the faculty advisor of the ACM Student Chapter of his university and will chair the ACM Europe Council Working Group on summer schools, having organized the Council’s first three summer schools, on the topic of Data Science. In 2017 he received the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.
I feel privileged to call ACM my professional home! I joined as a graduate student and have been contributing to its mission of “advancement of the art, science, engineering, and application of computing” since then.
If honored to be elected as President, I will use my experience from earlier volunteer positions to help ACM strengthen its leadership role, keep its finger on the pulse of the evolving needs of the computing community, and expand its extensive services to benefit all computing researchers, industry professionals, educators, and students around the world. In addition to strategic initiatives already in progress, I intend to pursue the following issues, which I care deeply about:
Expand footprint and become the home of interdisciplinary areas that involve computing: Our field is on the critical path of most scientific and societal activities. Interdisciplinarity is at the core of this, but the communities of “computational X/X-informatics” are largely elusive for ACM. While solidifying its spectrum of purely technological communities, ACM should also lead in shaping computing-related interdisciplinary areas, form strategic alliances with peer scientific societies, and expand its membership with colleagues of mixed backgrounds, giving them space for growth.
Facilitate Open Science methods: ACM should be a pioneer again and help redefine scholarly communication and the entire research life cycle, under the principles of reproducibility and accountability. It should treat software and data as first-class publishable results, embed all provenance artifacts in a publication, and explore new review processes and access policies. Especially on the latter, I will make every effort to achieve the financial viability of the current ACM plan toward pure open access.
Prioritize social responsibility: ACM should promote its new Code of Ethics widely within the community and should engage with and advise policy makers on cutting-edge technologies that may have significant consequences on society, such as threats on democracy, increasing inequalities, and loss of privacy. It should raise a strong voice for the application of technological innovation within clear ethical boundaries.
Join forces to address global challenges: The UN Sustainable Development Goals capture significant long-term challenges that digital technologies are fundamental in overcoming. ACM should liaise with the UN and other global organizations and establish the right mechanisms for its members to team up and contribute to relevant solutions.
Recalibrate for the next generation: Established 75 years ago, ACM has had tremendous impact by evolving continuously to better serve the needs of its diverse and inclusive members. It is time again to take stock of ACM’s strategies and mechanisms, listen to all voices, and make innovative changes that will transition ACM to its fourth quarter-century of life in full strength and agility, continuing to fulfill its vision of being “the premier global computing society.”
Candidates for PRESIDENT
(1 July 2022 – 30 June 2024)
JOSEPH A. KONSTAN
Professor and Associate Dean
College of Science and Engineering
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN
USA
Joseph A. Konstan is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he also serves as Associate Dean for Research. He teaches and conducts research on human-computer interaction, social computing, and recommender systems (personalization software and how it can be designed to support people experiencing information overload). He has an A.B. from Harvard (1997) and an M.S. (1990) and Ph.D. (1993) from the University of California, Berkeley, all in Computer Science. He has been a faculty member at the University of Minnesota continuously since 1992; he also co-founded Net Perception (to commercialize recommender systems technology) in 1996.
Konstan is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS and a member of the CHI Academy. He is also a recipient of the ACM Software Systems Award (2011) and the SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award. He has received eight best paper awards including four “test of time” awards.
Konstan has been active in ACM Service. He is currently serving as co-Chair of the ACM Publications Board (a position he has held since 2013). In that role he has been responsible for ACM’s transition toward Open Access, ACM’s adoption of policies to support author name changes, and ACM’s efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in its publications.
He was Chair of the SIG Governing Board (2006-2008) and vice-Chair of the Membership Services Board (2004-2006). He chaired the ACM Fellows selection committee in 2020 and has served on many boards and committees, including 14 years on ACM Council. Konstan has been involved in many ACM strategic planning efforts (including task forces on ACM-W, ACM’s role in health and medical informatics, and the strategic planning workgroup whose work eventually led to ACM’s open access publishing policy).
Konstan has also been active in SIGs, conferences, and journals. He served as President of ACM SIGCHI (2003-2006), he was general chair of UIST 2003, RecSys 2007, and CHI 2012; program chair or co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2000, UMAP 2011, CSCW 2016, and RecSys 2021, and helped organize the ACM Turing Award 50th Anniversary Conference. He edited SIGCHI Bulletin and served as Associate Editor or editorial board member for eight journals, including four ACM journals.
I attended my first ACM conferences (OOPSLA and UIST) 30 years ago, and soon after became a volunteer organizing exhibits for a conference. Over the past decades, my professional life has been greatly enriched by ACM’s conferences, journals, webinars, curricula, and more. I am grateful to ACM’s past volunteers, and excited to give back by running for President.
ACM does many things very well. We produce high-quality conferences and journals. Our top educators produce meaningful curricula. Our experts to inform the public and the world’s governments about important public policy issues from AI risks to voting system to the climate impact of computing. We set ethical standards for our field. We bring together computing’s top researchers, practitioners, and educators and support them with very capable staff and infrastructure.
But there are also areas where ACM is not doing as well as we should.
- We are too U.S.-centric, and have not done enough overall for diversity and inclusion in our field and within ACM itself.
- We lack a clear mission and value proposition for practitioner members.
- Our volunteers too often feel managed rather than supported.
- We struggle to effectively engage the next generation of computing leaders.
- Our elected leadership is too often focused on small issues rather than the strategic challenges we face as a society and a field.
The consequences are clear. ACM missed many opportunities in artificial intelligence and other rapidly growing subfields. Too often, I hear ACM referred to by members and even longtime volunteers as “they.” As in, “they won’t let us do this,” or “they make us do that.” When a professional society becomes “they” rather than “we,” there’s a problem. Our biggest threat is to be seen as irrelevant. Irrelevance threatens all three of ACM’s critical lines of business—conferences, publications, and membership—and with those our capacity to do good work in education, policy, ethics, and more.
I also know that ACM can and does change. I’m proud of the commitment we’ve made to open access and building a sustainable model for it. I’m proud that we’ve led the way in supporting transgender authors by enabling author name changes. I’m proud of how we’ve investigated and punished misconduct in peer review and beyond. And I am proud of so much more.
My plan for renewal starts with four key actions:
- Re-engage elected leaders: more frequent meetings; Council focus on mission and strategy; Executive Committee oversees execution.
- Relentless self-assessment, measurement, and transparency: assess volunteer experience; measure broader engagement and impact.
- Position ACM as a trusted, capable partner: leverage ACM’s expertise in conference, publications, and more to partner with other societies and groups.
- Convene serious strategic visioning: ACM and practitioners, global engagement, future of conferences and local activities, lessons from ACM’s failures.
I would welcome the chance to work together with you to renew ACM.
Candidates for VICE PRESIDENT
(1 July 2022 – 30 June 2024)
ELISA BERTINO
Samuel Conte Professor of Computer Science
Computer Science Department,
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN
USA
Elisa Bertino is Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. She has made pioneering contributions over the past 30 years to data management and data security theory and systems, along with contributions to broadening participation in computing via professional leadership and mentoring. Her contributions to data security and privacy include context-based access control, data integrity, privacy-preserving analytics, and data protection from insider threats. Her recent work focuses on security of cellular networks and IoT systems.
Prior to joining Purdue, she was a professor and department head at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Milan (Italy). She has been a postdoc at the IBM Research Laboratory (now Almaden) in San Jose, and a visiting professor at Singapore Management University and Singapore National University.
She has served as editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, and coordinating co-editor-in-chief of the Very Large Database Systems (VLDB) Journal. She served as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) between 2009-2013. She is a co-founder of the ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (ACM CODASPY). The conference started in 2011 and is the main forum for high-quality research on data privacy and security.
Bertino is a Fellow member of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. She received the 2019-2020 ACM Athena Lecturer Award and has been named to GSMA’s Mobile Security Research Hall of Fame for her work on 4G and 5G cellular network security. She received the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award “For her seminal research contributions and outstanding leadership to Data Security and Privacy for the past 25 years,” the 2002 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for “outstanding contributions to database systems and database security and advanced data management systems,” and the 2005 IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for “Pioneering and innovative research contributions to secure distributed systems.”
I have been a member of ACM for 40 years and over the years ACM has been an increasingly valuable resource for me. I am honored to have been nominated as a candidate for Vice President of ACM. I served as chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) and I am currently serving as ACM Secretary/Treasurer. I believe that those service experiences have prepared me to support ACM in its many activities in the role of Vice President.
I strongly believe that the field of computer science today is more exciting than ever. We see fundamental advances, such as those made possible by AI, IoT systems, quantum computing, and 5G technologies, and unprecedented opportunities for novel applications. Our technologies have a fundamental role in shaping society and addressing the major challenges humanity faces today.
However, key questions must be addressed including AI and data ethics, data transparency, personal privacy versus collective security, and sustainability. Answers to those questions as well as others posed by the pervasive use of our technologies must be given by considering a broad multidisciplinary perspective. If elected, I will work together with the ACM Executive Committee and the many volunteers and leaders in ACM to ensure ACM has a central role in fostering discussions and initiatives to answer those questions as well others posed by society concerning our technologies. I will also focus on important matters, such as broadening diversity in our field, supporting younger researchers, open access to data and publications, the role of conferences vs. journals, industry engagement, large-scale research infrastructures, and, last but not least, making sure ACM stays technically relevant by organizing workshops and conferences on new emerging technologies and applications.
Candidates for VICE PRESIDENT
(1 July 2022 – 30 June 2024)
CHRIS STEPHENSON
Head of Computer Science Education Strategy
Google
Mountain View, CA
USA
Chris Stephenson is the Head of Computer Science Education Strategy at Google. She received her B.A. (1979) and ME.d. (1996) from the University of Toronto and her Ph.D. from Oregon State University (2008). Her research interests include computer science (CS) education, equity and diversity, leadership, and professional development. Stephenson has numerous research publications in CS education and has authored/co-authored several white papers including ACM’s Running on Empty report. Stephenson received ACM’s Outstanding Contribution to ACM award (2018) and the ACM President’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education (2016).
In 2014, Stephenson joined Google where she leads global philanthropic programs to improve CS teaching and learning including Google’s CS Capacity program (2015-2018), which supported innovative research to address the CS undergraduate enrollment surge. In 2017, she launched Google’s CS-ER grants program, supporting rigorous CS education research.
From 2004 to 2014, Stephenson was the founding executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). Under her direction, CSTA grew to represent 32,000 members in 126 countries and became a powerful advocate for education. Stephenson led the development of the ACM K-12 Model Curriculum and the CSTA K-12 Standards for Computer Science Education and developed innovative leadership and advocacy programs for teachers. From 1986 to 2003, she was a Research Associate on the University of Toronto’s Compiler writing team where she investigated programming language use for post-secondary CS instruction. While at the University of Toronto, Stephenson also helped to spinoff (and eventually lead) an education software company.
Stephenson is now a co-chair of the ACM Education Board and Education Advisory Committee. In 2021, she was appointed to ACM’s Diversity and Inclusion Council.
She co-chaired the ACM Education Board Task Force on Student Retention in Undergraduate Computer Science programs (2018-2020) and chaired the ACM K-12 Education Task Force (1999-2003). Stephenson also served on the PISA Extended Mathematics Expert Group (2017-2018) and the College Board APCS Review Committee (2010-2012). She is currently a member of the Computing at Schools (U.K.) Board of Directors. She has consulted on curriculum development for Australia, Canada (ON), England, Ireland, New Zealand, and several U.S. states.
I am honored to be nominated for the position of ACM Vice President. ACM sits at the nexus of technology, innovation, and education and its contributions to the field and its members are substantial. ACM has thrived since 1947 for three reasons: It does work that matters; it creates community; and it supports members’ continued learning and growth. Much can be done to enhance these areas and increase ACM’s impact and its member services.
Computing continues its fractal-like expansion with an increasing number of subfields. This expansion drives new opportunities for interdisciplinarity and raises critical questions:
- What new resources can ACM provide to help members continually upgrade their professional knowledge and skills?
- How can publications evolve as sources of relevant, just-in time information?
- How can ACM mitigate the growing gap between industry expectations of new graduates and the capabilities of education institutions with already bulging curricula?
ACM’s leaders must engage with these questions in a serious and balanced way.
Computing provides opportunities for those willing to create and pursue them, but these benefits are not accessible to all. There are systemic barriers that prevent computing from representing all users and so new voices must be welcomed at the ACM table and heard throughout the organization. ACM has worked hard to be more diverse and inclusive, and it is not alone in this effort. Professional and scientific organizations worldwide are struggling to respond genuinely and substantively to issues of racism, misogyny, and social injustice. The generation now in our computer science classrooms and entering our industry is hungry for change and unwilling to accept excuses. If ACM is to continue to attract and serve members, it must redouble its equity work, set high expectations, track and measure their attainment, and weave equity into the fabric of everything it does.
When I began my Ph.D. program in 2004, every research paper and report I needed for my studies was freely available for download. By 2008, 80% of those papers were behind paywalls. As a life-long learner, I support the goal of making ACM content open and available to all. At the same time, I know that curating, growing, and maintaining the Digital Library into the future has a cost. I therefore strongly support ACM’s commitment to becoming an Open Access scholarly publisher and doing so in a way that is fair and sustainable.
As an ACM Vice President, I would promise to bring a fair, balanced, and consultative perspective to every decision and to think deeply about how the organization can continually evolve to better serve the members, the field, and the world.
Candidates for SECRETARY/TREASURER
(1 July 2022 – 30 June 2024)
THEO SCHLOSSNAGLE
Founder & Distinguished Engineer
Circonus
Malvern, PA
USA
Theo Schlossnagle has spent the last 20 years applying computer science to pressing problems in industry. He founded four companies, all grounded in large-scale distributed systems technology.
Schlossnagle studied at The Johns Hopkins University, where he received a B.S. in Computer Science in 1997 and a M.S.E. the following year related to his graduate work. In 2003, he left academia for industrial pursuits prior to completing his doctorate.
Beginning in 1996, he began participating in various open source communities including the Apache Software Foundation and in 1999, began a career in public speaking on topics both technical and professional.
Schlossnagle has contributed significantly to over 100 open source projects and shared his experience with industry peers through over 200 speaking engagements. He has authored Scalable Internet Architectures, (Sams) and wrote chapters for Web Operations (O’Reilly) and Seeking SRE (O’Reilly).
Having founded four engineering-led organizations, his perspective on the computing profession is both varied and well-informed; a perspective formed by operating some of the largest systems architectures on Earth, on-call rotations as a Site Reliability Engineer, developing both open and closed software systems, hiring engineering staff, mentoring, and guiding professional development of staff.
The ACM is dear to me; it represents the industry I love and those that are positioned to build the technology underlying our future.
With eight years of exposure to academia and 20 years of intense, entrepreneurial participation in industry, I feel I have a grounded perspective on how best the ACM can serve its members.
My experience as co-chair of ACM Queue and participation on the ACM Practitioner Board, ACM Publications Board, and ACM Digital Library Board provides immersion in the parts of ACM that directly touch the largest portion of its membership. My business experience includes decades of budget and P&L responsibility, as well as close work with vendor services including auditors, accountants, and legal counsel. I am excited to bring my business and technical experience to my role as Secretary/Treasurer.
Candidates for SECRETARY/TREASURER
(1 July 2022 – 30 June 2024)
JOHN WEST
Director of Strategic Initiatives
Texas Advanced Computing Center
Austin, TX
USA
John West is Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), one of the largest supercomputing centers in the world. His responsibility is to ensure TACC provides the right mix of technology and expertise to enable its tens of thousands of users to make new scientific discoveries across hundreds of scientific disciplines.
Before joining TACC, he was Director of the U.S. Department of Defense High-Performance Computing Modernization Program, a multi-hundred-million-dollar DOD-wide program that provides high-performance computers and computational expertise to the DOD research community. Prior to that, he held positions in private industry and the federal government, with responsibilities in computational modeling and high-performance infrastructure. He also founded the technical news site insideHPC. com, achieving 1.5 million pageviews per month before he sold it three years after launch; the company remains successful.
West was a founding officer of the ACM Special Interest Group on High-Performance Computing (SIGHPC) and responsible for communications and member recruitment, setting records for financial viability and member growth. He also served as SIGHPC’s Vice Chair, and now serves as its Chair. His efforts to foster a more inclusive computing community include creation of programs that have awarded more than $2M in fellowships and awards internationally to women and members of other groups underrepresented in computing. West also served as founding co-Chair of ACM’s Diversity and Inclusion Council and was a member of ACM Council from 2019-2021. Between 1996 and 2020, he held leadership roles in one of ACM’s largest conferences, and has served in multiple capacities on editorial boards, including most recently as Associate Editor-in-Chief. He is a recipient of the U.S. Army’s R&D award, past Chair of the High-End Computing working group of the National IT R&D Subcommittee, and a Distinguished Fellow of the Bagley College of Engineering at Mississippi State University.
It is exciting to be nominated for Secretary/Treasurer during a time when the pandemic and other social challenges have created dramatic opportunities for computing to reshape the ways in which we work and relate to one another across the world. I believe my experience leading large research and operational organizations has prepared me well to serve as an elected leader for ACM’s members. Professionally, I have focused on the integration of computing into other sciences, leading multidisciplinary teams to enable new discoveries through computing. Within ACM, I have served in leadership for ACM’s fastest-growing SIG and have experienced firsthand the value of SIGs and conferences as a “laboratory” for testing new ways to serve members. I have also served ACM-wide as co-Chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Council, SIG Governing Board, and other committees and working groups.
The pace of change in our profession, as in society, is dramatic. We face intense and exciting technical challenges as we create the tools of a new generation. As ethical professionals we also have the obligation to address important questions about who benefits from these tools, and who may be left behind. My long-term commitment to ACM stems from its unique ability to bring together the many groups needed to hold meaningful conversations about how to address these issues. We are also uniquely positioned to respond to the changes in our profession as a growing number of people join computing from other fields by communicating the best of our established practices.
As ACM moves to meet these challenges, I believe my experiences leading organizations to address the needs of many different groups—and to balance today’s urgencies against growth for the future—will serve ACM and its members well.
Candidates for MEMBERS AT LARGE
(1 July 2022 – 30 June 2026)
JUAN E. GILBERT
Chair, Computer & Information Science & Engineering Department
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL
USA
Juan E. Gilbert is the Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and Chair of the Computer & Information Science & Engineering Department at the University of Florida where he leads the Human Experience Research Lab. He is an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Gilbert received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring from President Barack Obama. He also received the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2014 Mentor Award. He received the 2021 ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award and the 2018 Computer Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award. In 2002, Gilbert was named one of the nation’s top African-American Scholars by Diverse Issues in Higher Education. He has served the ACM for many years. He currently serves on the ACM US Technology Policy Committee (ACM USTPC), the ACM Policy Award Committee, and he’s an ACM Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Council Member. He served as the chair for the USTPC E-Voting subcommittee. He is also a member of ACM SIGACCESS, ACM SIGCSE, and ACM SIGCHI. Gilbert has a B.S. in Systems Analysis from Miami University in Ohio and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati.
As a member at large of the ACM Council, I will work to continue to make the ACM the leading scientific and education computing society worldwide. I have worked my entire career to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in our field. I continue to serve on the ACM Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Council as well. Diversity, equity, and inclusion make us all better computing professionals, students, and researchers. As a member at large of the ACM Council, I will continue to advocate and share ideas on enhancing the ACM’s diversity, equity, and inclusion worldwide. ACM represents all of us and as an ACM Council member at large, I will work to see that the ACM’s membership diversity has a voice in the leadership.
RASHMI MOHAN
Senior Engineer
Splunk Inc.
San Francisco, CA
USA
Rashmi Mohan is senior engineering manager at Splunk Inc., where she leads the Enterprise Security SIEM product. As a technology leader, she has managed teams of engineers and helped deliver complex products—on-prem and in the cloud—in the security data analytics domain.
With a data engineering background, she has more than 21 years’ experience in various technical and management roles. As a co-founder at EnTrio Partners, she helped startups launch new products while accompanying larger companies on their digital transformation journeys. Prior to that, Mohan was a senior engineering manager at Yahoo! Labs in Bangalore, leading a group of scientists and engineers to convert cutting-edge ideas into prototypes and proofs of concepts. She also worked on reporting applications at Yahoo!.
Mohan is active in encouraging women and students in technology to aspire to and achieve more in their careers. She has served on the ACM Practitioner Board since 2018 and is the founding member/host of ACM Bytecast, the popular podcast series that features inspiring stories of eminent practitioners while showcasing their diverse paths to success. Mohan served on the ACM India Council as a member at large (2014-2018) and as council secretary (2016-2018). She was active in the ACM Eminent Speaker series, addressing ACM student chapters and ACM-W chapters countrywide.
Mohan has been associated with the Grace Hopper Conference in Bangalore for five years, as a mentor, an advisory committee member, a founding member of the all-women Hackathon, and as a Program Chair. She was also a mentor in the Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator and Google Launchpad programs. She is a prolific public speaker, including a popular talk at TEDx Chennai. Mohan has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University.
I am honored to be nominated to ACM Council’s Member at Large position. ACM embodies computing innovation; coming from the practitioner world, I am fascinated how various computing career paths and disciplines intersect. As host of the ACM Bytecast podcast series, I have spoken with some of our industry’s role models: their incredible stories helped me realize the computing profession’s momentous transformation. Skills are being developed in classrooms and on the job, where professionals experiment with new technologies to solve problems in unchartered territories.
My brush with entrepreneurship exposed me to the complex problems that founders face, often without possessing the requisite technical depth. Pairing them with ACM experts could forge amazing collaborations.
My dream is for ACM to support such visionaries, inspiring young minds to take risks, explore alternative career paths, and make the computing field equitable, welcoming, and fair for all.
If elected, my goals would be to:
- Promote ACM’s value to industry professionals and encourage collaborations and idea exchanges;
- Provide early career professionals with access to ACM programs and communities as they transition from an academic to an industry setting;
- Engage with entrepreneurs building new technology or using technology to improve lives and see how they can benefit from ACM’s vast knowledge base;
- Improve student awareness and support of meaningful STEM careers, beginning in high school;
- Empower women in CS to pursue more challenging roles via mentorship and forums, participation in communities, presenting their work online and in person, and,
- Make computing research more accessible and applicable to emerging global computing communities.
I look forward to continuing to contribute to ACM.
Candidates for MEMBERS AT LARGE
(1 July 2022 – 30 June 2026)
ANTONIO VALLECILLO
Professor of Software Engineering
University of Málaga
Spain
Antonio Vallecillo is Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Málaga, Spain. Between 1986 and 1995, he worked in the computer industry for companies such as Fujitsu and ICL, both in Spain and the U.K. Starting as Software Engineer, he also held positions as Product Manager and Marketing Director. In 1996, he joined the University of Málaga, where he leads a research group on software modeling and analysis, with special focus on social computing applications and uncertainty modeling.
He has been the General Chair of several international conferences, including ACM/IEEE MODELS’13 in the U.S. and ECOOP’17 in Barcelona, jointly held with the ACM SIGPLAN top conferences PDLI, SMM, and LETES. He actively participates in standardization activities within UNE/AENOR, ISO, and the OMG, has been the Spanish representative in IFIP TC2 and ISO SC7, and the editor of several ISO and ITU-T international standards.
Vallecillo was Vice Rector for Postgraduate Studies at the University of Málaga (2012-2016), responsible for the university’s master’s and Ph.D. programs, the Lifelong Learning courses, and MOOCs. From 2017-2020, he worked at the Spanish Research Agency (AEI), where he coordinated the Computer Science subarea. He was the President of the Spanish Society of Software Engineering (2014-2018). During his mandate, the Society adopted the ACM Code of Ethics and became a joint society of ACM. Since 2020, he serves as Vice President of the Spanish Computer Science Society (SCIE), actively collaborating with Informatics Europe and other international associations on Open Science, research evaluation, and computing education. He is a Senior Member of ACM, AAIA Fellow, and member of the Academia Europaea.
As the world’s leading computer society, I firmly believe ACM has a central role to play in these times when new technologies are reshaping our daily lives and professional activities.
I see a great opportunity for ACM to increase its technical leadership by fostering emerging fields within computer science. I believe ACM should raise public awareness of their ethical issues and social implications, and of the social responsibility of the computer scientists and practitioners that develop and use them. I also consider it essential for ACM to drive computer science education and lead the early incorporation of the new technologies in the Computing Curricula.
To strengthen its global and interdisciplinary character, ACM must attract and engage professionals from other disciplines, backgrounds, and cultures, favoring cross-fertilization of ideas, industrial practices, and experiences. It should keep promoting inclusiveness, diversity, equity, and sustainability, and stimulate interactions among SIGs and among Regional Councils. ACM should also enable and ensure global access to reliable scientific information through adequate implementation of Open Science initiatives beyond open publishing, and the promotion of Citizen Science activities.
Finally, to ensure a relevant impact on society, ACM must collaborate closely with policymakers, funding agencies, educational institutions, scientific societies, and professional organizations around the world. I deeply believe ACM is now uniquely positioned to become an authoritative voice and trusted source of information on digital technologies not only for its members, but for all of society.
If elected, I would use my experience on these topics to expand activities along these lines and help strengthen the organization as a whole.
MICHELLE ZHOU
Co-founder and CEO
Juji, Inc.
San Francisco, CA
USA
Michelle Zhou is a Co-founder and CEO of Juji, Inc., an AI startup that democratizes the creation and operation of Cognitive AI Assistants. Prior to founding Juji, she spent 15 years at IBM Research and the IBM Watson Group, where she led the research and development of Human-Centered AI technologies and solutions. Zhou is an ACM Distinguished Member and obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University.
Zhou’s work is in the interdisciplinary field of Human-Centered AI that intersects AI and Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on intelligent user interaction (IUI), such as powering conversational AI agents with human soft skills and automatic generation of interactive multimodal data storyteller. Her work has resulted in over 100 scientific publications, 45 patent applications, and a dozen widely used products and services, including IBM Watson Personality Insights. Currently, she works on no-code AI that enables anyone to create cognitive AI assistants with no code, pushing IUI to the mainstream and democratizing AI adoption in multiple domains, including education, healthcare, and talent management.
Starting as a student member of ACM, Zhou has served in a wide variety of roles to help build and grow the IUI community worldwide connecting academia, industry, and government agencies. She was the first community-elected Steering Committee Chair for the ACM International Conference Series on IUI and has served on 60+ ACM AI/HCI conference organizing and program committees and three editorial boards of ACM Transactions. She now serves as Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, promoting the awareness and development of Human-Centered AI, including explainable AI, AI ethics, and AI safety.
In my entire professional career, I have always considered ACM another “home” of mine in addition to my workplace. ACM has helped me grow my career and enabled me to connect with professionals worldwide, many of whom have become my friends, collaborators, mentors, and mentees. I am honored to be nominated as a potential Member at Large of the ACM Council and would appreciate the opportunity to serve the wider ACM community and help expand ACM’s reach and leadership in the following two areas.
“Home Expansion.” I would like to help make ACM a “home” for more people beyond just computing professionals, including business leaders and entrepreneurs. For example, as the EiC of ACM TiiS, I created a special column that publishes insights of thought leaders in AI + HCI to advise business leaders about Human-Centered AI and a special category of submissions, called Practitioners’ Toolbox, tailored to non-AI experts or non-IT professionals. With my multidisciplinary background and extensive experience of working with academia, industry, and government, I can help develop more venues and opportunities to make ACM a bigger community.
“Association of Compassionate Machinery.” Although ACM is already a leader in shaping the IT industry and STEM education, it can also help shape our society at large in many areas, such as establishing technical standards for evaluating AI performance and safety, helping formulate policies to safeguard the development and use of powerful computing technologies, and defining new curricula for non-STEM students to learn computing skills. I believe my entrepreneur experience and my close collaboration with many stakeholders (for example, K-12 educators) would be an asset to ACM in taking a leadership role in these areas.
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