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.
Por favor, voten por mí.
S’il vous plaît, votez pour moi.
ERIK ALTMAN
Manager, Dynamic Optimization Group
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Yorktown Heights, N. Y.
U.S.
candidates for
SECRETARY-TREASURER
(7/1/14–6/30/16)