Chris Hankin receives the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award

Chris Hankin, a professor at Imperial College London, received the award for fundamental contributions to ACM Europe and for bringing a European perspective to critically important ACM committees and activities.

Professor Hankin has been a continuous member of ACM since 1994, and has made significant contributions to the association. He served on the Editorial Board of ACM Computing Surveys from the mid-1990s and acted as co-editor of the Computing Surveys Symposium on Strategic Directions for Research on Programming Languages, held at MIT in 1996 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of ACM. He served with distinction as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Computing Surveys from 2007 to 2013. He joined the Assessment and Search Committee of the Publications Board in 2015 and became Co-chair in 2017.

He was elected to the ACM Europe Council in 2015 with the goal of reinforcing the policy arm of ACM in Europe. He is the co-author of two major policy papers from the Committee: the white paper on cybersecurity and the white paper on automated decision making. The first was referenced by the European Commission’s top scientific advisory group (SAM). In July 2020, he became Chair of the ACM Europe Technology Policy Council and contributed to the enlargement and restructuring of the group, with the goal of making it the leading technology policy body in Europe.

The Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award recognizes outstanding service contributions to the Association. Candidates are selected based on the value and degree of service overall and may be given to up to three individuals each year.