The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced its 2018 Fellows. A total of 56 scholars with outstanding contributions in computer-related fields were honoured; and six Chinese scholars — Fei-Fei Li, Huan Liu, Jiebo Luo, Lili Qiu, Tian He, and Lillian Lee — are among them.

Said ACM President Cherri M. Pancake: “When we identify our tech leaders, we often think of men and women in industry who have made technologies pervasive while building major corporations. At the same time, the dedication, collaborative spirit and creativity of the computing professionals who initially conceived and developed these technologies goes unsung. The ACM Fellows program publicly recognizes the people who made key contributions to the technologies we enjoy.”



The new ACM Fellows have made significant contributions in areas such as accessibility, augmented reality, algorithmic game theory, data mining, storage, software, and the World Wide Web. The ACM will officially recognize the 2018 Fellows at its annual Awards Banquet in San Francisco next June.

The work of the six Chinese Fellows is mainly concentrated in data mining, knowledge reasoning, feature engineering, database construction, natural language processing, and wireless networks. Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and Co-Director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute Fei-Fei Li built large knowledge bases for machine learning and visual understanding. Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University Huan Liu’s contributions include feature selection and feature engineering in social media. Jiebo Luo meanwhile is a Professor at the University of Rochester whose research areas are contextual inference and multimedia video analytics.

There are currently more than 500 ACM Fellows globally, and an increasing number of Chinese Fellows have been added in recent years. Two Chinese scholars were elected in 2016, nine in 2017 and six in 2018. The ACM Distinguished Member Award which debuted in 2006 and recognizes ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience who have had an outstanding influence in the computer field also reflects the growing contributions of Chinese scholars. In 2017, eight Chinese researchers received this honor, accounting for nearly a quarter of the total. This year the number increased to twelve.



Founded in 1947, the ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.