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Society and the Computing Profession

Society and the Computing Profession

Available Speakers and their Lectures on this Topic

Haider Abbas – Islamabad, Pakistan

Editor's Perspective of Publishing Quality Research
Academic research publication in a journal plays a key role in knowledge dissemination and the career development of researchers. However, despite its importance, very minimal or negligible formal...

Ronald Michael Baecker – Toronto, ON, Canada

DIGITAL DREAMS HAVE BECOME NIGHTMARES: WHAT WE MUST DO - A CALL TO ACTION
For eighty years, digital technology visionaries have imagined and created systems to support human knowledge, learning, creativity, medicine, health, communications,...
ETHICAL TECH STARTUPS: CONVERSATIONS WITH FOUNDERS
This is a companion talk to ETHICAL TECH STARTUPS: PRINCIPLES FOR SUCCESS.

I shall interview the founder of a local tech startup success. For example,...
ETHICAL TECH STARTUPS: PRINCIPLES FOR SUCCESS

As of 2020, 14 if the world's 50 wealthiest billionaires made their money in technology. Microsoft alone has created over 10,000 millionaires. Unicorns are privately held startup...
WHAT SOCIETY MUST REQUIRE FROM AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, especially machine learning (ML) programs, are now being employed or proposed for use in:

a) scanning résumés to weed...

Mehdi Bahrami – Santa Clara, CA, United States

Advancing AGI: From Training and Fine-Tuning to Interactive Agent Development
This talk begins by tracing the history of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and discusses potential advancements and future directions. AGI can enhance not only the capability of...
Discovering Bias in Large Language Models (LLMs)
The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has brought with it both opportunities and challenges. While LLMs and more broadly generative AI technologies are capable of...

Emery D Berger – Amherst, MA, United States

How to Have Impact: Five Easy Pieces
Because my research group has had a pretty good record of getting the fruits of our research adopted “in the real world”, I often get asked how to get work adopted. In this...

Athman Bouguettaya – Sydney, NSW, Australia

Workshop on Writing for (top) Computer Science Journals
This workshop aims to train early career researchers and PhD students to write for top CS journals and convert conference papers into successful quality journal articles. Writing for journals...

Duncan P Brumby – London, United Kingdom

Generative AI: Lessons from Dickens for the Information Age
Generative AI is transforming how we work, learn, and create, offering significant opportunities while raising important ethical and practical challenges. In this timely lecture, Professor...
The Smartphone Paradox: Essential Yet Distracting
How often do you check your phone? If you’re like most people, it hasn’t been long. Smartphones, the defining innovation of the last two decades, have revolutionized how we...

Federico Cerutti – Brescia, Italy

Managing the risks of digital transformation
This lecture examines the critical challenges of managing risks in digital transformation, integrating insights from the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and...

Muhammad Aamir Cheema – Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Success in Academic Publishing: Insights, Tips, and Best Practices
This talk on academic publishing provides researchers with insights, tips, practical strategies to navigate the complex process of publishing academic papers. The talk begins with an...

Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas – Lima, Peru

ACM/IEEE-CS Computing Curricula (CC2020)
The landscape of computing is in constant flux. To keep pace, a global task force known as the Computing Curricula (CC) has convened approximately every decade since 1968 to redefine...
Automating Curriculum Design for Global Computing Education: A 15-Minute Solution
Developing robust and internationally aligned curricula is a time-consuming challenge faced by academic departments across all disciplines, from computing and architecture to medicine,...

Daniela Damian – Victoria, BC, Canada

Collaborative learning and social impact: The Future of educating diverse and inclusive technology teams?
Underrepresentation of female-identifying students in technology development starts early in our education system, in middle and secondary schools, and grows into a more significant problem in our...

Lance Eliot – Palo Alto, CA, United States

Artificial Intelligence Trends for Computer Science Students
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic and offers great opportunities for computer science students. This talk covers the latest key trends in AI and discusses research challenges worthy of...
Career Advice for Computer Science Students
What will you do after completing your computer science degree? Many computer science students are unsure of what they will do next after graduation. There are a multitude of avenues to choose...
Entrepreneurship for Computer Science Students
Computer science students often dream of being an entrepreneur and launching a high-tech startup but do not know what this entails and how to get underway. This talk covers the key elements of...

Marcus Foth – Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Intermediation in Design: Designers as Intermediaries
Design practices often involve grassroots communities and institutional actors with designers working as or with intermediaries. This talk introduces intermediation and suggests the merits of...

Dan Garcia – Millbrae, CA, United States

Achieving CSforALL through the Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC)
At a time when computing is so much a part of all of our lives, has incredible job opportunities, and is so empowering, most students graduate high school without having had any introduction to...
Beauty and Joy of Computing 1-week Professional Development
The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is a CS Principles (CSP) course developed at UC Berkeley, intended for high school juniors through university non-majors. It was twice chosen as...
Effective Teaching, Mentoring and Curriculum Development
(This talk is aimed at early-stage faculty, especially those from under-served groups)

There are many hats young faculty are asked to wear, yet most "how to be a...
Why Latino Students Need Computer Science Now
We all know that technology is profoundly changing the way we work, learn, communicate, and play. More significant is what this means for your students' futures and their ability to compete in...

Donald Gotterbarn – Johnson City, TN, United States

Being a Computer Professional: Technology in context
Understanding computing professionalism helps us manage the ethical and social outcomes of our technical decisions. This talk focus on recognizing and avoiding some of the traps of...
Computer Ethics and Technology
This talk focuses on computer ethics as it relates to the day to day activities of practicing computer professionals. The emphasis is on real world moral and legal issues for the practicing...
Software Development: More Than Just Programming
We are often surprised by the number of non-programming related issues that affect the professional’s efforts to develop quality software and web interfaces. Development efforts are...
Unmanaged Risk: Why Systems Don't Work
Serious software failures plague our profession. Software testing and risk analysis can only impact certain factors to reduce software failures. Proactive methodologies and strategies that...
What to do about Ethics: Using the ACM Code of Ethics in Decision Making for the Computing Professional (non-philosopher)
Decisions made by a computing professionals impact others. A goal of computing professionals is to minimize the negative impact of their decisions on all stakeholders. The ACM Code of Ethics helps...

John Grundy – Melbourne, Australia

Tips on applying for funding
Targeted towards Early Career Researchers and PhDs, in this talk I discuss some of the fundamentals of applying for grant funding. While I use examples from predominantly Australian Schemes, I...

Sumit Gulwani – Redmond, WA, United States

AI-assisted Programming: Applications, Experiences, and Neuro-symbolic techniques
AI can enhance programming experiences for a diverse set of programmers. This includes professional developers and data scientists who require assistance in software engineering and data...
Art of Disruptive Research
Sumit’s research career, spanning more than 2 decades, has been filled with diverse experiences: from proving theorems to writing code and shipping features inside mass-market...
Enhancing LLM performance with Cognitive Strategies
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful general-purpose tool capable of performing a wide variety of tasks. However, they are not very precise by themselves. The good news is that...
Storytelling and Science
Something magical happens when we hear “Let me tell you a story”. Stories are powerful because they play out upon a universal narrative structure (understood even by a toddler)...
The Story of Flash Fill and how it shaped me
The Flash Fill feature in Microsoft Excel allows users to automate string transformations like converting “FirstName LastName” to “lastname, firstname” from just one...

Gernot Heiser – Sydney, NSW, Australia

How to Write a Great Paper
Publication in prestigious venues is key to academic impact, and in computer science this mostly means the top-tier conferences. These venues receive large number of submissions, resulting...

Letizia Jaccheri – Trondheim, Norway

We Should All Be Feminists in Software Engineering
Software engineering is a paradigm of human activities that incorporates our problem-solving capabilities, cognitive aspects, and social interaction. Software is an infrastructure of all...

Sheldon H Jacobson – Urbana, IL, United States

Communicating Your Research to the Public: Things They Never Taught you School
Communicating scientific research to a broad audience has become aprerequisite for success in today’s academic environment. This presentation discusses numerous facets of academic...
Is Computational Redistricting and Algorithms the Solution to Gerrymandering?
Every 10 Years, the outcome of the United States Census leads to a reallocation of congressional seats, typically requiring state legislatures to redesign their congressional districts. This...

Jim Jansen – Doha, Qatar

The Perilous Journey of Journal Publishing
Publishing a research article is a journey! We will discuss challenges and advice on preparing, submitting, and revising research manuscripts to increase the probability of acceptance at a...

Amy J Ko – Seattle, WA, United States

Deconstructing CS Culture
Modern computing culture is unquestionably exclusionary. In education, students who are Black, Hispanic, women, women, gender non-conforming, disabled, or divergent in many other way from the...
Searching for Justice in Programming Language Design
From its earliest days, computing has been an eclectic project of capitalism, war, colonialism, and white supremacy. Its central Western values of utility, efficiency, rationality, and...

Manoj Kumar Kumar – Sydney, Australia

Nurturing Sustainability: A Paradigm Shift in Developing Digital Solutions
In an era defined by rapid technological advancement, the call for sustainability resonates more urgently than ever before. This talk delves into the transformative intersection of...

Michele Lanza – Lugano, Switzerland

Presentation 101
Giving presentations is a cornerstone of the computing profession. It is rather bizarre to see how little most researchers know about how to design, create, and deliver professional presentations....

Seng Loke – Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Living in an Automated City: Promises and Perils
What if (almost) every aspect of a city is automated, from transportation, waste management, maintenance, policing to urban gardening? Developments in AI and the Internet of Things technologies...

Walid Maalej – Hamburg, Germany

(Tech-) Transfer: Patterns and Lessons Learned from the "German Model"
Universities around the world are extending their main purpose from Research and Education to a third pillar often called Knowledge/Tech Transfer or simply Transfer. This lecture aims at...

San Murugesan – Sydney, NSW, Australia

Green IT and Sustainability: Addressing the Global Environmental Crisis Embracing Technology
The socio-economic developments around the world and peoples’ behavioural changes continue to contribute to increase in carbon-dioxide emission and environmental deterioration,...
The Golden Age of Digital Innovation and Disruption: How to Become an Innovator and Create Lasting Impact
We’re fortunate to be living in the age of ongoing digital innovations and disruption. Driven by advances in digital and other technologies, open and creative mindset, emergence of...

Fabio Paternò – Pisa, Italy

End-User Development for Personalizing Applications, Things, and Robots
The need for allowing end users to obtain digital systems that are not only easy to use but also easy to modify in terms of their user interfaces, behaviour and functionalities emerged very...
Human Control in Daily Environment Automations
How people interact with digital technologies is currently caught between the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. Such technological...
Humanoid Robots for Older Adults
Every country in the world is experiencing growth in both the size and the proportion of older people in their population. Thus, an increasing demand for high-quality support for...
The Role of Automatic Support in Accessibility Validation
The importance of providing accessible applications for all, including people with cognitive or physical disabilities, has become increasingly recognised, given the rapid growth of online...

Steven Pemberton – Amsterdam, Netherlands

4 a.m. is the new midnight(and other internet philosophies)
For nearly 60 years we have experienced the effects of Moore's Law, the exponential growth in the power of computers, with the cost of computing halving every 18 months or so. ...
Declarative Programming
In the 50s, when the first programming languages were designed, computers cost millions, and relatively, programmers were almost free. Those programming languages therefore reflected...
The Computer as Extended Phenotype/The Evolution of Memory
In genetics they talk of the "phenotype". This is any observable characteristic or trait of an organism including its form and structure, development, behaviour, and even products...
The Internet of Things and the coming Robot Rebellion
Technological changes in society seem to be accelerating: in fact you can go back tens of thousands of years and discover an alarming pattern: they are accelerating at an exponential rate....
The One Hundred Year Web
The year 2023 marks the thirty-second anniversary of the World Wide Web being announced: on 6 August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project to an...
The Printing Press vs The Web: The Effects
The introduction of book printing changed the world: information became more available, and much more affordable, and a whole new infrastructure and economy was created for the distribution...
The future is already here, just not very evenly distributed
The future doesn't just suddenly happen. It comes creeping up on us,like an oil slick.

For instance, in 1991 the first web server went online; the Web wasn't an...

Junaid Qadir – Doha, Qatar

Engineering and Computing Education for the 21st Century
We live arguably in the most exciting period in human history for engineering in which advances in knowledge and abilities to process, communicate, and analyze large amounts of data has resulted...
How to Write A Paper That Readers Will Thank You For?Tips on Bringing Clarity to Writing
The ability to write clear prose to communicate ideas is an essential 21st century skill. Washington accord, the international accreditation agreement for undergraduate professional engineering...
Learning 101: What All Computing and Engineering Should Know About Learning
As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, the 2020s, the unprecedented rate of technological disruption and the short-lived nature of the specifics of engineering...
The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
AI technology has revolutionized numerous disciplines but it also has significant use of abuse (e.g., deep fakes, social bots, profiling people, social discrimination). We have realized that...

Peter Robinson – Cambridge, United Kingdom

Of machines and men
Continuing improvements in computer technology are allowing machines to perform in ways that model human activity, to the extent that many people now treat machines as if they were...

Albert Ali Salah – Utrecht, Netherlands

Data collaboratives and using mobile phone data for social good
New sources of human behavior data can empower humanitarian projects, but they need to be carefully handled, properly anonymized and aggregated. In this talk, I will discuss the potential...
Designing computational tools for behavioral and clinical science
Automatic analysis of human affective and social signals brought computer science into closer alignment with social sciences, enabling new collaborations between computer scientists and...

Kim W. Tracy – Terre Haute, IN, United States

Software History - Specific topic to be chosen
This lecture covers a specific area of software's history and how it has evolved over time. The topics can range from early computers and their software (up to about 1955),...
Software History - Why is it important?
This lecture covers why it is important for computing professionals to study software history, includes a number of specific examples, and details how software history can be studied as part of an...

Salvador Elias Venegas-Andraca – Mexico City, Mexico

The Quantum MBA: making sense of quantum tech in your organization
Quantum is everywhere: newspapers, magazines, technical journals, and social media talk about the power and distinctiveness of quantum technology. For business leaders, it is only natural...

Justin Zobel – Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Search, society, and the global information ecology
Search technology was originally developed in the field of information retrieval as a computational replacement for the physical indexes used for libraries, but today is a key enabler of...
The Arrival of the Internet
The Internet underpins modern society: commerce, government, and our ordinary daily activities are completely reliant on it. But how did it emerge? What factors led to its existence? What...