Chris L. Hankin

Digital Library

Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award

United Kingdom - 2020

citation

For fundamental contributions to ACM Europe and for bringing a European perspective to critically important committees and activities of the ACM

Chris Hankin has been a continuous member of ACM since 1994, and has made numerous, 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 the ACM. He served with distinction as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Computing Surveys from 2007-2013. He joined the Assessment and Search Committee of the Publications Board in 2015 and became Co-Chair in 2017. During his first term as Co-Chair, the remit of the Committee has expanded from journals to include magazines and ACM Books.

Chris 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 accepted the position of 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.

Chris Hankin served as the chair of ACM Europe Council from 2017-2019. During his term Chris made it a priority to strengthen the visibility of ACM with younger generations in Europe. In this direction, he promoted the organization of two highly successful summer schools (organized by Yannis Ioannidis and Fabrizio Gagliardi), which addressed outstanding graduate and senior undergraduate students.

Finally, Chris Hankin co-edited (with Panagiota Fatourou) the first CACM Special Section on Europe in 2019, which offered a representative imprint of some of the most exciting activities on the continent, served on the ACM CEO Search Committee, and represented Europe on the Nominations Committee for the 2020 ACM elections.