Communications of the ACM

Biography

Erik Altman is currently chair of ACM’s SIG Governing Board (SGB) and its 36 constituent Special Interest Groups. One of his initiatives as SGB Chair was to create 11 broad groupings of SIGs to ease finding SIGs of interest ( acm.org/sigs). He is also working with ACM headquarters to pilot daily newsfeeds for each SIG.

Altman previously served as Awards Chair on the SGB Executive Committee and is past chair of ACM SIGMICRO. Under his watch, SIGMICRO had strong finances, established a Hall-of-Fame, relaunched its newsletter, and completed an Oral History project.

He joined ACM in 1992, and has also been a member of SIGARCH, SIGPLAN, and SIGGRAPH. His first paper was in the Genetic Algorithms conference.

As an IBM manager, Altman directs two projects: wait.ibm. com: on performance tooling; and Liquid Metal—Programming heterogeneous systems with FPGAs and GPUs in a Java-like language.

Altman’s previous research
focused on binary translation
and optimization, compilers,
and micro-architecture. He has
co-authored more than 45 papers,
and holds almost 30 patents and
pending patent applications. He
was an originator of IBM’s DAISY
dynamic binary translation project.

He was an architect of the Cell processor in Sony’s Playstation- 3, and has worked as a hardware and software engineer at Bauer Associates, Machine Vision, and Tek Microsystems.

Other service: Current Editor-in-Chief IEEE Micro; Program Co-Chair and General Chair: PACT and NPC Conferences; Program Chair: CASES Conference; Co-Founder and three-year General Chair: Workshop on Binary Translation; Co-Founder: FastPath Workshop and IBM P=ac2 Conference; Guest Editor: IEEE Computer, Journal of Instruction Level Parallelism, and

IBM Journal of R&D; Chair, ACM Student Research Competition at PAC T; Keynotes: 2009 PEPSMA Workshop; 2011 CGO Conference,

2013 Cosmic Workshop. All these conference and workshops have been financially sound, as have aggregate SIG Finances.

Altman received an SB (MI T,

1985), an MS (McGill, 1991), and Ph.D. (EE, McGill, 1995).

Statement

ACM has many strengths, but also areas to improve. As my bio notes, I have held many volunteer positions, and launched initiatives to further such improvements. If elected Secretary- Treasurer, I will continue those efforts and welcome your comments ( altmane@acm.org).

I talk to many ACM members and non-members. Alas, many seem unaware of all ACM offers, especially the 60% of ACM’s members who are practitioners; for example, ACM has an excellent set of book offerings around specialized skills. If elected, I will push to expand and publicize it. Also underutilized: ACM’s Distinguished Speakers, who can help keep practitioners and members around the world abreast of the latest ideas. As SGB Chair, I piloted newsfeeds tailored to individual SIGs. If elected, I will work to finish them. ACM can also learn from others, for example, the British Computer Society has strong practitioner offerings.

Other issues confront ACM,
such as Open Access and the
expectation information will
be free. ACM has started good
experiments, for example, opening
conference papers for one month,
authors or SIGs can pay for open
access for a paper or proceedings,
author webpages can have “Author-
Izer” links for free Digital Library
downloads. But more
work remains.
ACM must fund its good
works: books, undergrad and
AP curriculum revisions, the
Turing Award, Digital Library
enhancements (like apps), more
inclusive computing around the
world, insuring conferences, staff
to help members and volunteers,
and more. Thus, we must find ACM
offerings—conferences, books,
news—for which which people
will pay modest prices. ACM’s next
Secretary- Treasurer will play a key
role in those decisions. I hope you
will give me that privilege.