Association for Computing Machinery

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest and most prestigious scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 100,000 as of 2011. Its headquarters are in New York City. It and the IEEE Computer Society are the primary umbrella organizations for academic and scholarly interests in computing.
Unlike the IEEE, however, the ACM is solely dedicated to computing.


ACM is organized into over 170 local chapters and 35 Special Interest Groups (SIGs), through which it conducts most of its activities. Additionally, there are over 500 college and university chapters. The first student chapter was founded in 1961 at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Many of the SIGs, like SIGGRAPH, SIGPLAN, SIGCSE and SIGCOMM, sponsor regular conferences which have become famous as the dominant venue for presenting innovations in certain fields. The groups also publish a large number of specialized journals, magazines, and newsletters.
ACM also sponsors other computer science related events such as the worldwide ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), and has sponsored some other events such as the chess match between Garry Kasparov and the IBM Deep Blue computer.


Services


ACM Press publishes a prestigious academic journal, Journal of the ACM, and general magazines for computer professionals, Communications of the ACM (also known as Communications or CACM) and Queue. Other publications of the ACM include:
ACM XRDS, formerly "Crossroads" and renamed and designed in 2010, the most popular student computing magazine in the US.
ACM interactions, an interdisciplinary HCI publication focused on the connections between experiences, people and technology, and the third largest ACM publication.
A number of journals, specific to subfields of computer science, titled ACM Transactions. Some of the more prominent transactions include:
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)

ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS)
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Although Communications no longer publishes primary research, and is not considered a prestigious venue, many of the great debates and results in computing history have been published in its pages.
ACM has made almost all of its publications available to paid subscribers online at its Digital Library and also has a Guide to Computing Literature. Individual members additionally have access to Safari Books Online and Books24x7. The ACM also offers insurance, online courses, and other services to its members.