About Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award

Jack W. Davidson, Professor, University of Virginia, receives the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for leadership in and contributions to ACM’s Publications Program.

Davidson served as Co-Chair of the ACM Publications Board from 2010 through 2021 and has been the founding chair of the ACM Digital Library Board since 2021. In those roles, he has led several key efforts of paramount importance to ACM, its membership, and the computing community. For example, Davidson led the effort to revitalize and enhance the ACM Digital Library, including chairing ACM’s new DL Board and building a team of volunteers who are advancing the platform’s infrastructure, data services, and interfaces.

Davidson also helped guide ACM through the difficult process of moving from a subscription-based free-to-publish model towards full open access, which ACM is on track to complete within the next few years.

Concurrent with these efforts, Davidson challenged the ACM’s Publications Board to address some of the longstanding issues in academic publishing. For example, as publication ethics cases expanded from plagiarism to more extensive cases of compromised reviewing, broken confidentiality and bullying, Davidson steered the Publications Board through challenging investigations and related policy changes. Among the efforts to adopt more inclusive publications policies during Davidson’s tenure, ACM instituted a new author name change policy, which applies to transgender authors as well as authors who change their names for reasons of religion or marriage.

Davidson is also credited with expanding ACM’s publications portfolio with the addition of interdisciplinary journals, a new line of Research and Practice Journals, as well as the new Proceedings of the ACM series. To advance replication and replicability, he also built on earlier efforts to establish standards and badging for the evaluation of artifacts and effects.

Joseph A. Konstan, Professor, University of Minnesota, receives the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for 25 years of dedicated service and leadership in support of ACM's mission and operation, and the advancement of ACM's research, education, and practitioner communities.

Konstan has been involved in ACM’s activities for over 25 years: participating in, developing, and nurturing new technical areas, serving on key task forces and committees, and leading several of ACM’s major boards and working groups. He has demonstrated a volunteer spirit that has been an example and inspiration for others who have had the opportunity to work with him. His long involvement in and deep insight into ACM’s operation and governance has made him a trusted source of advice for ACM’s elected leadership, volunteers, and staff.

Konstan’s service started in 1994 within ACM SIGCHI’s conferences, eventually becoming SIGCHI’s President (2003-2006) and Chair of the SIG Governing Board (2006-2008), and as a member of ACM’s Executive Committee. During that time, he served on a task force on the future of ACM-W.

As Co-Chair of the Publications Board (2013-2022), Konstan served on ACM’s Extended Executive Committee, providing insightful advice and recommendations to the elected leadership. In that regard, he chaired ACM’s Strategic Planning Workgroup (2013–2014), which set the priorities and roadmap for ACM’s continued growth and development. He also worked on the task force on the future of the Journal of the ACM (JACM) and chaired the task force on ACM’s future directions in Health and Medical Informatics.

Konstan is hailed by colleagues for his efforts to bring people together to make the best decisions for ACM and the communities it serves. His many contributions to ACM have been, and no doubt will continue to be, outstanding.

Chris Hankin was named recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for fundamental contributions to ACM Europe and for bringing a European perspective to critically important ACM committees and activities.

Hankin, a professor at Imperial College London, has been a continuous member of ACM since 1994, and has made significant contributions to the association. He served on the Editorial Board of ACM Computing Surveys from the mid-1990s and acted as co-editor of the Computing Surveys Symposium on Strategic Directions for Research on Programming Languages, held at MIT in 1996 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of ACM. He served with distinction as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Computing Surveys from 2007 to 2013. He joined the Assessment and Search Committee of the Publications Board in 2015 and became Co-chair in 2017.

Hankin was elected to the ACM Europe Council in 2015 with the goal of reinforcing the policy arm of ACM in Europe. He is the co-author of two major policy papers from the Committee: the white paper on cybersecurity and the white paper on automated decision making. The first was referenced by the European Commission’s top scientific advisory group (SAM). In July 2020, he became Chair of the ACM Europe Technology Policy Committee and contributed to the enlargement and restructuring of the group, with the goal of making it the leading technology policy body in Europe.

Hankin served as Chair of the ACM Europe Council from 2017 to 2019, when he made it a priority to strengthen the visibility of ACM with younger generations in Europe. In this direction, he promoted the organization of two highly successful summer schools (organized by Yannis Ioannidis and Fabrizio Gagliardi), which addressed outstanding graduate and senior undergraduate students.

Finally, Hankin co-edited (with Panagiota Fatourou) the first CACM Special Regional Section on Europe in 2019, which offered a representative imprint of some of the most exciting activities on the continent.

Arati Dixit was named recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for contributing to the growth and diversity of ACM programs in India, especially ACM-W India.

Dixit is currently a Senior Scientist at Applied Research Associates, Inc. in Raleigh, North Carolina, as well as a Teaching Associate Professor in the ECE department at North Carolina State University. Dixit has been an active member of ACM-W India, an initiative that focuses on the empowerment of women, for many years. In 2013, she was involved in launching the first ACM-W Celebration of Women in Computing event in Pune. ACM-W Celebrations are events that are designed to build a sense of community among women in computing and can include anything from a technical session, to a graduate panel, to a career fair. When she became Chair of ACM-W India in 2017, Dixit expanded the number of ACM-W celebrations to eight diverse regions of the country in both rural and metropolitan settings. She also championed the creation of an annual ACM-W India hackathon.

In 2017, when the broader ACM India Council initiated a program of summer schools across the country to encourage undergraduate students to take up graduate studies, Dixit proposed the idea of having one of the schools dedicated exclusively to women. Dixit organized the first school in Pune in 2017, and an additional summer school was added in Bengaluru in 2018. These women-only summer schools were a success and the model has been repeated. The number of ACM-W chapters across India also grew during Dixit’s tenure. When she stepped down as Chair at the end of 2019, there were 35 active ACM-W student chapters and three ACM-W professional chapters in the country.

Dixit’s other prominent public contribution to ACM was her work as the founding Vice Chair of the ACM India Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (iSIGCSE), in which she made tireless efforts to promote ACM curriculum implementation across India. As an ACM India Eminent Speaker, she has delivered more than 50 talks on diverse topics. She has been especially active with her local ACM professional chapter in Pune, having served as Chair, Vice Chair, and Secretary/Treasurer.

Chris Stephenson was named recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for advancing CS education by architecting and nurturing the Computer Science Teachers Association to incorporate more than 22,000 K-12 CS educators and partners into the ACM community.

Central to Stephenson’s vision has been the idea that advancing computing as a professional field requires K-12 students to be introduced to computer science by educators with the tools, training, knowledge, and confidence both to teach the subject matter and to inspire students with their passion. She also has been guided by the ideas that K-12 teachers will be more effective in the classroom if actively engaged with other members of the professional computing community, and that K-12 computer science education is more effective when it is informed by academic research and industry expertise.

To realize her vision, Stephenson founded the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) in 2004, with the support of ACM, and thereafter became its founding Executive Director. During her 10 years leading CSTA, she grew the organization to include 20,000 members around the world and 60 regional chapters.

Her scholarly research contributions were disseminated in several influential reports including: Bringing Computational Thinking to K-12: What Is Involved and What Is the Role of the Computer Science Education Community?; the inaugural CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards; Running on Empty: The Failure to Teach K–12 Computer Science in the Digital Age; and Bugs in the System: Computer Science Teacher Certification in the U.S. These reports have led to projects, initiatives, and policy changes that have deeply and positively impacted K-12 education and educators globally.

Now Head of Computer Science Education Strategy at Google, Stephenson has continued her work with ACM education initiatives. She is currently a member of the ACM Education Board, where she has been actively engaged in developing curricular materials to meet the needs of computer science educators and students, both in the US and abroad. She also recently co-chaired the Board’s retention in undergraduate computer science task force.

Steve Bourne was named recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for significant contributions to ACM, particularly for reaching out to practitioners through the development of the Practitioners Board and ACM Queue, and for his support of students worldwide through his engagement with, and support of, the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).

During his tenure as President of ACM (2000-2002), Bourne envisioned and encouraged the expansion of the ACM membership from its historic academic and research base to include practicing professionals. He instituted and fostered projects to interest and support this practitioner demographic, and his involvement in these programs continues to this day. A centerpiece of these efforts was the launch of ACM Queue, a first-of-its kind magazine for practicing software engineers. In enlisting and guiding the magazine’s first editorial board, Bourne envisioned a publication that would not simply chronicle industry news, but rather provide software engineers with insights into future challenges that lie just ahead.

Bourne also broadened ACM’s appeal to professionals by initiating and developing the ACM Practitioners Board. The board meets regularly to ensure that ACM continues to offer products and services that support and enhance the professional and technical development of ACM members. An apt reflection of the fastest-growing areas of computing, the Practitioners Board includes practicing engineers, computer architects, and IT specialists and managers, among many others.

Another of Bourne’s contributions to ACM has been his active participation since 2001 in the ACM-operated International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Now in its 42nd year, ICPC counts more than 320,000 alumni.

Valerie Barr was named recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for reinventing ACM-W, increasing its effectiveness in supporting women in computing worldwide and encouraging participation in ACM. Barr, a Professor at Union College, has been uniquely effective in turning good ideas about how to increase the participation of women in computing into tangible programs that yield measurable results.  When she first joined the Association for Computing Machinery’s Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) in 2005, she launched a scholarship program. Barr and others believed that if more young women could attend major computer research conferences, they would be encouraged to continue in the field. Since its inception in 2006, the program has expanded the horizons of numerous young women internationally and has continued to grow. Because of Barr’s adeptness at conveying her vision to funders, the program is 100% supported by industry contributions. Last year, the ACM-W Scholarship Program distributed $40,000 over 40 awards.

ACM-W’s dedicated and hard-working volunteers share a central goal of bringing women together for mentoring, networking, and other career-enhancing activities. Since becoming the Chair of ACM-W in 2012, Barr has been a driving force in more than tripling the number of ACM-W chapters around the world, from 50 to 180 today. One strategy that led to this growth was the introduction of special networking events in which colleges and universities with ACM-W chapters would invite students from neighboring colleges and encourage them to establish ACM-W chapters on their own campuses.   ACM-W Councils in Europe and India oversee activities in their respective regions.  Another notable area of growth during Barr’s tenure as Chair has been a significant increase in ACM-W Celebrations, small conferences in which women from specific geographic regions come together for career fairs, industry panels and technical presentations. Celebrations events have expanded to Cuba and the Philippines, and one event is tailored specifically for community college students. Last year, 25 ACM-W Celebrations took place around the world.

ACM-W members especially look forward to Connections, a monthly newsletter Barr instituted that is sent to 36,000 people each month and is considered a “must read.”