Ask the Candidates for ACM President!

https://tinyurl.com/acmelection2026

We hope that ACM will organize similar Q+A forums in the future, but for now this in an unofficial, community organized effort. You do not have to be an ACM member to suggest questions.

ACM Members: Remember to vote!

Note: The voting site closes at 16:00 UTC on May 22, 2026.

Process

Questions or comments?

We welcome questions and feedback about this process including suggestions for how to do this better in the future.

Please reach out to vardi at cs.rice.edu with questions, comments, suggestions.

Deadline: The deadline for posting questions is April 30, 2026.
Note: Elisa Bertino was invited to respond, but has not be able to do so for lack of time.

Questions and Answers

1. Q: With all due respect to Vardi, why is he running this Q&A as a private person. Shouldn't ACM be running it as part of the election process?
   JP: Perhaps this QandA is like developing a new course at UCLA. The flow at UCLA is that the instructor first gives an informal version and later proposes a course that goes on the books. My hope is that Vardi's effort can lead to an election process that is on the books.
2. Q: What is the biggest thing you would like to change in ACM as president?
   JP: The biggest thing I want to change in ACM is the communication with the community.
3. Q: Why do you think the petition to boycott the International Congress of Mathematics (ICM), where the Fields Medal is awarded, if it remains in the US is so popular? How would you as ACM president represent the scholarly voices who are so discontent with the United States right now?
   JP: ACM is international and our conference organizers think a lot about where to locate our meetings. I like that we can respond to community voices about preferred locations and unfavored locations.
4. Q: What are your views on the climate footprint of our community? How do you believe we can transform our practice in order to respect the Paris agreement on climate (COP21)
   JP: As I wrote in CACM in 2020, we should publicly account for the carbon footprint of our conferences. This will be the first step towards managing our practice.
5. Q: Why aren't you running for ACM president yourself, Moshe?
   MV: I considered running about a decade ago, but I decided against it for personal reasons, which are still valid.
6. Q: What reasons can you give a young researcher why they should join ACM, beyond just supporting the field?
   JP: We should all spend some of our time on helping other people. ACM gives many wonderful opportunities to do that.
7. Q: How do you handle the split constituency, research and practitioners, and should we still serve both?
   JP: We should serve both constituencies. One of the ways I want to increase the involvement of the practitioners is to make them mentors of current students.
8. Q: How do we make Computing feel like a single field, instead of just a union of SIGs?
   JP: I don't think we need to make computing feel like a single field. One of our biggest problems is to make ACM feel small, rather than big.
9. Q: How should ACM take the lead in AI? Should we embrace the future or the past?
   JP: We should embrace the future and help our practioners get the AI skills they need to stay employed.
10. Q: Collusion rings and other reviewer misconduct could have a big impact on ACM's reputation. What are your thoughts on dealing more effectively with this and also high reviewer load?
    JP: We need an ACM-wide view of our reviewing practices, we need more meta-reviews that "review the reviews", and likely we need AI to help us detect patterns of misconduct.
11. Q: What do you think of the ACM Code of Ethics?: https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
    JP: I like the ACM Code of Ethics! To me, its central thesis is that \"all people are stakeholders in computing\" and its central call is for us to respect other people.
12. Q: ACM's aims at encouraging participation from anyone via its DEI program. Yet it organizes many onsite conferences that are too expensive for most people to attend. How can we integrate people who don't travel to these events?
    JP: We organize conferences in many cities, and we can do more do encourage local participation and offer reduced fees to the disadvantaged.
13. Q: As a DORA (Declaration of Research Assessment) signatory, how will you move ACM beyond symbolic support to stop the reliance on conference rankings (CORE/CCF) for hiring and funding?
    JP: ACM is already working on taking a stand on how to evaluate researchers based on creativity and impact, rather than on numbers and rankings.
14. Q: ACM aimed at moving to open-access publishing in early 2026, but is now heavily advertising the \"premium\" version of ACM DL. What should be ACM's long-term goal wrt subscriptions?
    JP: ACM's long-term goal should be to make open access financially sustainable. ACM is ahead of most other organizations in this respect, yet it has to continue to make good decisions to achieve sustainability.
15. Q: Would you take a stand for lowering ACM's fees (at conferences, for SIGs, etc)?
    JP: ACM's conferences have a small surplus, percentage-wise, in most years, which is due to careful and thoughtful planning by our conference organizers. To me this is a sign that the conference fees are where they need to be.
16. Q: How do you view the phenomenon of hyperpublications? If it is an issue, what should be done about it?
    JP: I like quality over quantity. To me, hyperpublication is a sign of an incentive structure that has drifted away from a focus on quality. ACM should be a force for reminding everybody about quality over quantity.
17. Q: The Turing Award has a terrible track record with respect to female representation. What will you do about this?
    JP: I am on the ACM Athena Lecturer Award committee, where we select awardees among outstanding women researchers in computing. The nominees are amazing! For the Turing Award, we need everybody to nominate more women.
18. Q: Flying to a conference emits tons of CO2. What should be ACM's role in limiting our climate impact by reducing conference travel?
    JP: We should publicly account for the carbon footprint of our conferences. We should continue our experiments with conferences that are at multiple sites at the same time. Also, as much as I enjoy medium-sized meetings, we need to co-locate conferences more.
19. Q: Should ACM encourage research on topics (such as AI) creating new technologies that have a disastrous impact on natural ressources?
    JP: I have a positive outlook on AI. I think AI will help increase our life span, decrease the number of people who die of hunger, and decrease the cost of energy production. I recognize AI's outsized use of resources today, but I am also optimistic that this will improve.
20. Q: The ACM decided in 2022 to not holding events in Russia \"while the conflict in the Ukraine and the humanitarian crisis in Europe continue\". Should we make similar committments in regards to other countries on similar grounds?
    JP: I see the decision in 2022 as related to the safety of people who attend our events. In ACM, we always think carefully about the location of our events.
21. Q: Given ACM's commitment to human well-being and avoiding harm, how will you limit ACM's involvement in ongoing wars?
    JP: ACM stays out of wars. We are a world-wide professional society that spans all nations.
22. Q: As described recenly by Vardi, ACM seems to be discouraging small, though vital, SIGs. How will you deal with this issue?
    JP: In 2024-2025, I chaired a taskforce that recommended a reduction in overhead payments for the smallest SIGs. Specifically, the taskforce recommended a reduction from $25,000 to $10,000 per year. This recommendation was adopted and it goes a long way towards enabling small SIGs to be viable.
23. Q: The ACM DL is developing tool to convert papers to HTML, but the system is worse along all axes (output quality, cost, support for tools such as Latex packages) compared to the tools built by Arxiv. How will you address this?
    JP: We need to improve ACM's support for HTML, in particular because it will improve accessibility. Fortunately, we have a few things to build on. First, ACM has a dedicated team working on the Digital Library, including HTML support. Second, ACM is increasingly engaging with and learning from the arXiv team. Third, we are collecting author experiences and should do more of that. I want to see these efforts, within ACM and in collaboration with arXiv, bring ACM's support for HTML up to the level of arXiv by 2027.
24. Q: What do you plan to do with the presidential task forces that current ACM President Yannis Ioannidis has set up?
    JP: The main value of a presidential task force lies in producing timely and well-founded recommendations, regardless of whether it is started under one president and completed under another. I will support the task forces in completing their work and delivering their recommendations. I will then review them carefully and work with the ACM Council to decide how best to act on them.
25. Q: The USA is on a path to becoming an increasingly inhospitable country for science in general and immigrants/guests in particular. What are your thoughts about finding a new host country and formal institutional structure for ACM?
    JP: ACM is a global organization, even though its host country is the USA. Recently, ACM established the Global Engagement Board and has begun working toward opening regional offices around the world. One idea is that the office in the host country can primarily be a back office with staff services, while regional offices take on a stronger role in welcoming and supporting members across the globe. I prefer that we monitor the global situation carefully, while avoiding a rushed decision on changing the host country.
26. Q: Authors now use a wide spectrum of AI tools for light polishing of text to AI generation. Asking authors to simply disclose if they used AI tools does not seem to give enough information. What changes would you propose/support?
    JP: The 2020s are a transition period. At the beginning of the decade, authorship involved little use of AI; by the end, it will likely involve a great deal. In 2026, we have only seen a glimpse of what AI-assisted authorship may become. ACM made the right choice by requiring disclosure and may decide to ask for more detailed disclosure over time. I support evolving our disclosure practices to provide more meaningful information about how AI tools are used in the research and writing process. ACM has a new task force on responsible AI use and I look forward to hearing its recommendations. To me, a major question we face is how much it matters whether high-quality research results are produced by people, by AI, or by a combination of both.
27. Q: Practitioners in domains like data science and AI often do not consider themselves computer scientists. As students, they be enrolled in different majors and show little interest in traditional CS courses. Do we in CS consider those domain as part of CS? (If not, then CS becomes relatively less important in society.) If yes, what value do we bring to them; why would they want to join ACM?
    JP: Data science and AI are interdisciplinary and span many fields, including computer science. At UCLA, for example, I see many departments engage actively with data science and AI. In this area, computer science departments offer many relevant courses, both foundational and applied. At UCLA, students from other disciplines are eager to take our courses, and many do. This growing demand creates an opportunity for ACM. Specifically, ACM can develop guidance on curricula for students across disciplines and convene communities that bridge different fields. This builds on ACM's long history of welcoming people who do not identify as traditional computer scientists, and it should continue to do so in this context. ACM already has several special interest groups related to data science, including SIGHPC, SIGIR, SIGKDD, SIGMOD, and others, as well as ACM Journal of Data Science.
28. Q: The current education model is pre industrial age. When most every other industry was modernized, then costs fell an order of magnitude, most providers closed, and the public was arguably better served. Think wooden ships. Luckily we professors are too smart to fall victim to this trend. Until AI... What do you think of this proposition and how should ACM plan, and help its members plan, for the future?
    JP: AI is changing the labor market in ways we are only beginning to understand. In some areas, there is increasing emphasis on practical experience, which raises an important question: how do recent graduates gain that experience? One answer is to adapt education. We should take a fresh look at the needs of the job market and give students opportunities to develop skills and experience that were previously acquired during the first years in a job. ACM can play a leading role by recommending curricula and educational practices that better prepare graduates for this evolving landscape and support lifelong learning for everyone.
29. Q: What will you do about the papers in ACM's library that have been publicly or privately reported as fraudulent years ago already?
    JP: ACM has a committee and a process for considering claims of fraud and taking appropriate steps, up to and including retraction. I encourage the submission of well-supported concerns and expect ACM to handle them in a timely and transparent way to maintain the integrity of the scholarly record and the trust of the community.
30. Q: Do you commit to aligning ACM's internal rules with those of the industry-standard Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)? ACM's current stand is that it explicitly rejects these rules in favor of its own rules that very clearly aren't working, as this thread exemplifies https://pubpeer.com/publications/83CCE7AD292E3CEDE6B33700FD9B4B
    JP: ACM is an active member of COPE, but I do not think a blanket commitment to any single external framework is the right approach. ACM has a long history of developing and applying its own policies for publication ethics, and that experience is important. I welcome constructive criticism of weaknesses in ACM's policies and want ACM to improve them where needed. These policies should remain clear, fair, and trusted by the community, and support timely and appropriate correction of the scholarly record.
31. Q: Do you believe ACM's "extremely high" retraction threshold and consequent lag behind other publishers in terms of scientific integrity is acceptable? (source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19197)
    JP: This article raises important questions. I see ACM's thorough review process as one of our strengths, and I want us to keep improving it so that problems are caught early and the need for retractions is small. At the same time, when issues are identified after publication, they should be addressed carefully and in a timely manner to maintain trust in the scholarly record.
32. Q: What do you think are the biggest challenges facing ACM?
    JP: One of the biggest challenges is communication with the community. ACM has made important decisions in the last decade, including the move to open access, but we need to communicate more clearly about such decisions. Another challenge is to embrace areas such as AI and quantum computing in a way that reflects the breadth of the field and attracts new members.
33. Q: Do you think it's normal for ACM to not do anything about plagiarized papers despite reports because such reports weren't made from the right form? See https://pubpeer.com/publications/83CCE7AD292E3CEDE6B33700FD9B4B#2
    JP: ACM has a committee and a process for considering claims of plagiarism and taking appropriate steps, up to and including retraction. It is important that concerns are submitted in a way that allows them to be reviewed properly, and that they are handled carefully, fairly, and based on evidence. The goal is to protect both the integrity of the scholarly record and due process for all involved. Credible concerns should be acted upon; inaction is not the goal of the process.
34. Q: Your personal belief: Does ChatGPT show that academia has made no real progress in the Turing Test but industry has and is leaving academia behind by light years and if so, why?
    JP: I don't see recent progress as showing a gap between academia and industry. Progress has come from a close interplay between the two, with ideas and people moving back and forth. Advances such as ChatGPT build on decades of academic research, and industry has played a crucial role in scaling and deploying these ideas. I expect this collaboration to continue to be a key driver of progress. I particularly value examples of collaboration between academia and industry, such as the Science Hub for Humanity and Artificial Intelligence, a joint effort of UCLA and Amazon.
35. Q: Almost 1700 people signed a petition calling ACM to restore free and open access to all DL bibliometric data that was open under the "closed DL", but then closed under the "open DL". See https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/restore-fully-free-and-open-access The response by ACM was mealy mouthed, and never addressed explicitly the request by the petitioners. See https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3797916 What is your response to the petitioners?
    JP: I agree: everything that was freely accessible under "closed DL" should also be freely accessible under "open DL". I was happy to see the petition succeed: ACM restored free access to DL bibliometric data, which was the right outcome. I also see this episode as an example of how ACM can do a better job of communication with the community, especially about major changes.
    Comment by reader: Author-profile pages and Advanced Search used to be available in the "Closed DL", but they are no longer available in the "Open DL" without paid subscription.