Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is an international learned society for computing founded on September 15, 1947, and headquartered in New York City. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, reporting nearly 110,000 student and professional members as of 2024.
The ACM is an umbrella organization for academic and scholarly interests in computer science. Its motto is "Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession".
History
In 1947, a notice was sent to various people:
On January 10, 1947, at the Symposium on Large-Scale Digital Calculating Machinery at the Harvard computation Laboratory, Professor Samuel H. Caldwell of Massachusetts Institute of Technology spoke of the need for an association of those interested in computing machinery, and of the need for communication between them.
After making some inquiries during May and June, we believe there is ample interest to start an informal association of many of those interested in the new machinery for computing and reasoning. Since there has to be a beginning, we are acting as a temporary committee to start such an association:
The committee had gained experience with computers during World War II: Berkeley, Campbell, and Goheen helped build Harvard Mark I under Howard H. Aiken, Mauchly and Sharpless were involved in building ENIAC, Tompkins had used "the secret Navy code-breaking machines", and Taylor had worked on Bush's Differential analyzers.
The ACM was then founded on September 15, 1947, under the name Eastern Association for Computing Machinery, which was changed the following year to the Association for Computing Machinery. The ACM History Committee since 2016 has published the A.M.Turing Oral History project, the ACM Key Award Winners Video Series, and the India Industry Leaders Video project.
Activities
ACM is organized into over 180 local professional chapters and 38 Special Interest Groups, through which it conducts most of its activities. Additionally, there are over 680 student chapters. The first student chapter was founded in 1961 at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.Many of the SIGs, such as SIGGRAPH, SIGDA, SIGPLAN, SIGCSE and SIGCOMM, sponsor regular conferences, that serve as major publication venues in their respective 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, and has sponsored some other events such as the chess match between Garry Kasparov and the IBM Deep Blue computer.
Services
Publications
ACM publishes over 50 journals, such as the Journal of the ACM which academic citation metrics rank among the top computer science publications, and two general magazines for computer professionals, Communications of the ACM and Queue.Other publications of the ACM include:
- ACM XRDS, formerly "Crossroads", was redesigned in 2010 and is 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.
- ACM Computing Surveys
- Computers in Entertainment
- ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems
- ACM Special Interest Group: Computers and Society
- A number of journals, specific to subfields of computer science, titled ACM Transactions. Some of the more notable transactions include:
- *ACM Transactions on Algorithms
- *ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
- *ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
- *IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics now published through the IEEE and entitled IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
- *ACM Transactions on Computational Logic
- *ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
- *ACM Transactions on Database Systems
- *ACM Transactions on Graphics
- *ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software
- *ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
- *IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
- *ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems
- *Games: Research and Practice
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. ACM also offers insurance, online courses, and other services to its members.
In 1997, ACM Press published Wizards and Their Wonders: Portraits in Computing, written by Christopher Morgan, with new photographs by Louis Fabian Bachrach. The book is a collection of historic and current portrait photographs of figures from the computer industry.
Portal and Digital Library
The ACM Portal is an online service of the ACM. Its core are two main sections: ACM Digital Library and the ACM Guide to Computing Literature.The ACM Digital Library was launched in October 1997. It is the full-text collection of all articles published by the ACM in its articles, magazines and conference proceedings. The Guide is a bibliography in computing with over one million entries. The ACM Digital Library contains a comprehensive archive starting in the 1950s of the organization's journals, magazines, newsletters and conference proceedings. Online services include a forum called Ubiquity and Tech News digest. There is an extensive underlying bibliographic database containing key works of all genres from all major publishers of computing literature. This secondary database is a rich discovery service known as The ACM Guide to Computing Literature.
ACM adopted a hybrid Open Access publishing model in 2013. Authors who do not choose to pay the OA fee must grant ACM publishing rights by either a copyright transfer agreement or a publishing license agreement.
ACM was a "green" publisher before the term was invented. Authors may post documents on their own websites and in their institutional repositories with a link back to the ACM Digital Library's permanently maintained Version of Record.
All metadata in the Digital Library is open to the world, including abstracts, linked references and citing works, citation and usage statistics, as well as all functionality and services. Other than the free articles, the full-texts are accessed by subscription. In addition, starting on April 7, 2022, ACM made its publications from 1951 to 2000 open access through the Digital Library in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the organization's founding.
In 2020, ACM launched a major push to become a fully open access publisher by 2026. ACM restructured its pricing for the ACM Digital Library on the basis of publishing activity by affiliated lead authors in ACM's journals, magazines, and conference proceedings. Under this model, termed "ACM Open," institutions pay set fees for full access to ACM Digital Library contents as well as unlimited open access publishing by their affiliated authors. Authors not affiliated with a participating institution will be expected to pay an article processing charge. As of May 2024, ACM reported that more than 1,340 institutions worldwide had signed on for ACM Open, putting ACM at just over halfway to meeting its target of 2,500 participating institutions by 2026.
Membership grades
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".The number of Fellows, Distinguished Members, and Senior Members cannot exceed 1%, 10%, and 25% of the total number of professional members, respectively.