About the ACM Organization

ACM brings together computing educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. As the world’s largest computing society, ACM strengthens the profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life‐long learning, career development, and professional networking.

Founded at the dawn of the computer age, ACM’s reach extends to every part of the globe, with more than half of its nearly 100,000 members residing outside the U.S. Its growing membership has led to Councils in Europe, India, and China, fostering networking opportunities that strengthen ties within and across countries and technical communities. Their actions enhance ACM’s ability to raise awareness of computing’s important technical, educational, and social issues around the world.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific society, uniting  computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

The Association for Computing Machinery was founded as the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery at a meeting at Columbia University in New York on September 15, 1947. Its creation was the logical outgrowth of increasing interest in computers as evidenced by several events, including a January 1947 symposium at Harvard University on large-scale digital calculating machinery; the six-meeting series in 1946-47 on digital and analog computing machinery conducted by the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers; and the six-meeting series in March and April 1947, on electronic computing machinery conducted by the Department of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In January 1948, the word “Eastern” was dropped from the name of the Association. In September 1949, a constitution was instituted by membership approval.

ACM publishes, distributes and archives original research and firsthand perspectives from the world’s leading thinkers in computing and information technologies that help computing professionals negotiate the strategic challenges and operating problems of the day. ACM publishes journals, plus newsletters and annual conference proceedings. ACM is also recognized worldwide for its published curricula recommendations, both for colleges and universities and for secondary schools that are increasingly concerned with preparing students for advanced education in the information sciences and technologies.
Communications of the ACM, keeps information technology professionals up-to-date with articles spanning the full spectrum of information technologies in all fields of interest. Communications also carries case studies, practitioner-oriented articles, and regular columns and blogs. The monthly magazine is distributed to all ACM members. ACM Queue is a monthly magazine created by computing professionals for computing professionals that sets out to define future problems with the sort of detail and intelligence that readers in turn can use to sharpen their own thinking. Visit the ACM Digital Library for a complete list of ACM publications.
ACM also provides the ACM Digital Library, the definitive online resource for computing professionals. The DL provides access to ACM’s collection of publications and bibliographic citations from the universe of published IT literature. With its personalized online services and extensive search capabilities, the Digital Library represents ACM’s vision of an all-electronic publishing program.
The Digital Library contains the citations and full text of articles, representing all of ACM’s journals, newsletters, and proceedings. Each citation contains links to other works by the same author; clickable references to their original sources; links to similar articles and critical reviews, if available; and digital object identifiers (DOIs) to easily manage electronic linkages to vendors.
In addition, the DL consists of a bibliographic database of more than a million citations from a broad range of information technology publications and publishers. Many of these citations contain abstracts and/or reference sections as well.

Get Involved with ACM

ACM is a volunteer-led and member-driven organization. Everything ACM accomplishes is through the efforts of people like you. A wide range of activities keeps ACM moving: organizing conferences, editing journals, reviewing papers and participating on boards and committees, to name a few. Find out all the ways that you can volunteer with ACM.

ACM Chapters

Chapters are the “local neighborhoods” of ACM. Professional and Student chapters worldwide serve as nodes of activity for ACM members and the computing community at large, offering seminars, lectures, and the opportunity to meet peers and experts in many fields of interest.

ACM: Formed at the Dawn of Computing

ACM was established in 1947 soon after the creation of ENIAC, the first stored-program digital computer, to “advance the science, development, construction, and application of the new machinery for computing, reasoning, and other handling of information.”

ACM-W

ACM-W supports, celebrates, and advocates internationally for the full engagement of women in all aspects of computing, providing a wide range of programs and services to ACM members and working in the larger community to advance the contributions of technical women. Membership in ACM-W is open to all ACM members and is free of charge.

Guiding Members with a Framework of Ethical Conduct

Learn more about ACM’s commitment to ethical standards: the ACM Code of Ethics, Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice, and Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE), which is guiding these and other intiatives.

ACM Regional Councils

ACM’s Regional Councils provide grassroots support on a global scale. Based in Europe, India, and China, they raise awareness, visibility and relevance of ACM by sponsoring high-quality conferences, expanding chapters, and encouraging greater participation in all dimensions of the society.

ACM Europe   ACM India   ACM China