letter from acm china council

DOI: 10.1145/2133806.2133807
Yunhao Liu and Vincent Shen

acm china council
The ACM China Council was launched in June 2010
as a key component of ACM’s China initiative.
The goal of ACM China Council is threefold:
to increase the number of high-quality ACM activities

in China, to raise ACM’s visibility throughout China, and to contribute to advancing computing as a science and profession in China. In the process, we work to increase ACM membership in China.

We can report significant progress in these areas since our 2010 launch.

Indeed, before the existence of the ACM China Council, most, if not all, Chinese professionals thought ACM was an American organization. In addition, Chinese membership in ACM was low—less than 1,500 total.

The first two major tasks for ACM China were educating the computing community about ACM—what it is and what it offers—and recruiting more members in China. Early on, ACM China initiated conversations with the China Computer Federation (CCF).

With more than 15,000 members, CCF has a dominant position among computer professionals and students in China and is very much like ACM in terms of its mission and focus on publications, conferences, and chapters.

The discussions between ACM China and Zide Du, the General Secretary of CCF, and other officials in CCF were quite productive, partly because many of the members-at-large of ACM China are also senior members of CCF.

During CCF’s 2010 China Nation-
al Computer Conference (CNCC) at
Hang Zhou, Zhejiang, China, ACM
President Alain Chesnais delivered
a keynote speech to 1,500 attend-
ees, introducing ACM, its activities
worldwide, and the nature of volun-
teer work within the Association. His
talk was well received. ACM CEO John
White and CCF’s Zide Du then signed
a Memorandum of Understanding
(MOU) between the two organiza-
tions. This MOU established a special

Speakers from this program visited more than 90 universities last year.

ACM co-sponsored CNCC 2011, held at Shenzhen, Guangdong Province last November. ACM Turing Award winner, Joseph Sifakis, and ACM’s past president, Dame Wendy Hall, delivered keynote talks; Yunhao Liu addressed the opening ceremony.

More than 2,000 computing academics, students, and professionals attended this event. At that conference, the CCF Executive Committee voted to continue the joint-membership arrangement with ACM by increasing the cost of CCF membership to include ACM membership. In late February of this year, more than 10,000 CCF members formally joined ACM.

We believe ACM China has reached the original goals set during its first meeting in 2010. In the next two years, we expect to have 10–20 chapters in China and 15,000 members. We plan to organize more activities, especially to improve communications and outreach in both academic institutions and industry. We also plan to sponsor some joint awards with CCF and to begin translating selected articles from Communications of the ACM into Chinese for distribution to members in China.

 

Yunhao Liu ( [e-mail]), Vice chair for operations of acm china council, is a professor in the Department of computer science and engineering at tsinghua university, beijing, china. Vincent Shen (shen@ cse.ust.hk), Vice chair for Publications and conferences of acm china council, is professor emeritus in the Department of computer science and engineering at hong Kong university of science and technology, Kowloon, hong Kong. to learn more about acm china, visit china.acm.org © 2012 acm 0001-0782/12/04 $10.00