The emergence of computer science as an academic discipline is a central but understudied topic in the history of computing. This project examines ACM's key role in defining the intellectual content of computer science through its model curricula. In 1962 ACM established a Curriculum Committee on Computer Science (C3S), which published Preliminary Recommendations for undergraduate education in 1965 and a full curriculum in 1968. The first major revision of the ACM curriculum, Curriculum '78, aimed to expand the discipline to smaller colleges and update its approach to the theory and practice of computer science. Curriculum '68 and '78 have been crucial tools for institution building, allowing departments to build stable degree programs and academic credentials to be compared across schools. In parallel with these activities, the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), founded in 1969, became an important forum for educational experiments and debates. Using historical sources such as curriculum materials, committee records, interviews with key players, and SIGCSE publications, I explore how ACM's curriculum efforts helped to define computer science. Debates over what the curricula should include reveal how boundaries were drawn between computer science and other disciplines (such as math or engineering) and how some areas within computer science became seen as essential while other topics were cast as marginal or outdated. Studying the evolution of ACM's curricula will provide a window into the profession's evolving sense of its meaning and purpose.

This biography of Edmund Berkeley, one of the ACM founders, will illustrate how Berkeley's concepts of social responsibility underpinned his activities surrounding the founding of the ACM, thus exploring the social context giving rise to this seminal organization. In 1939, while Berkeley was at Prudential Insurance, he visited George Stibitz at Bell Labs and saw his early computer built with telephone relay switches. Berkeley determined that this fledgling digital computer could help people make better decisions through mechanized deductive reasoning based on symbolic logic, which he had studied as an undergraduate mathematics major at Harvard University. During World War II, Berkeley worked with Howard Aiken at his Harvard lab on the Mark II computer, which also employed relay switch technology. After the war Berkeley returned to Prudential Insurance as the head of a research lab there for implementing electronic computer technology to insurance data processing. In these early post-war years, Berkeley was active in East Coast computer development circles, He was in the thick of issues developers had with coordinating the fast-paced R&D work being done in the military and private corporations. The need for communication channels became apparent to coordinate these R&D efforts for efficient development of the technologies which would become critical to the US during the Cold War. It was out of these needs and efforts that Berkeley and seven of his colleagues formed the ACM in 1947. This watershed historical moment will become pivotal in Dr. Longo's biography of Edmund Berkeley being supported by this fellowship.

This project investigates the early history of computer graphics and the role they play in the move toward new forms of simulation and object oriented design. Beginning in the 1960s there is a shift in the field of computer science from computation as procedural, end-driven, linear calculation, toward a kind of computation through simulation ¨C of simulating a world comprised of constructed objects that are capable of discrete forms of interaction. These objects are nameable, actionable, and visualizable, and are meant to replicate real world engagement with a knowable object world. While in the past computing had largely been concerned with the computation of information about the world, and in solving problems derived from the information taken from real world contexts, this shift marks a move to digitize the physical world, such that it can be made subject to a system of simulation from which we might derive new knowledge. Central to this transformation is the development of new forms of computer visualization and object modeling brought about by the development of computer graphics and its growth into a full-fledged technical industry. Ultimately it is my goal to draw connections between this field and the broader history of computing, and show the importance of computer graphics not only to the development of a visual language of computing, but to a transformation toward object oriented models of simulation.

The project "The history of ACM SIGWEB as a framework for a conceptual history of hypertext" aims to research a conceptual history through the history of an institution and its members and explore how institutional memory can be preserved through conceptual history research. The project will investigate the history of hypertext as it has been envisioned, designed, created, and practiced by those who consider their work relevant to the activities of the ACM special interest group on hypertext, hypermedia, and the web (SIGWEB). Another important theme that will be explored in this study is the unique atmosphere of interdisciplinary inclusiveness that has always been part of the community of hypertext researchers. SIG WEB is one of the ACM SIG groups that intentionally incorporate works from computing /engineering fields and the social sciences / humanities into their communications. This project will bring together the themes of conceptual and institutional history and interdisciplinarity and offer the scholarly community a joint history of ACM SIGWEB and hypertext in an attempt to understand a connection between the two, promote interdisciplinarity in the studies of technologies and computing, and think about how writing a history can contribute to the organization of institutional archives.

This oral history project will document and publicize the career contributions of several European pioneers of computer networking. With very few exceptions, our existing histories of computer networking focus narrowly on the ARPANET and Internet, and frame the growth of these networks as a primarily American story. As a result, these histories undervalue the contributions of European researchers and their networking experiments -- such as the Cyclades network and the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Reference Model -- that were antecedents, alternatives, and competitors to the ARPANET and Internet. With the support of an ACM History Fellowship, this oral history project will begin with interviews of recipients of the ACM SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Contribution, including Peter Kirstein and Louis Pouzin. These interviews will shed light on the ACM's important institutional role in disseminating knowledge and facilitating international collaboration during a phase of rapid development in computer networking during the 1970s and 1980s. These interviews also will enrich our understanding of the particular cultural, political, and economic contexts of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s that shaped¡ªand in some cases limited¡ªthe development of international computer networks.

The Soviet computer pioneer, Andrei Ershov, first applied for an ACM membership in May, 1965, during his visit to the United States on the occasion of the congress organized by the International Federation for Information Processing in New York. After the congress, Ershov was invited on a tour of the West Coast computing centers. The blue and yellow membership card and the itinerary of the visit itself were tokens of the personal and professional relationship connecting the Soviet computer scientist to the American computing community. The chapter 3 of my dissertation, "Computer Science from Silicon Valley to Golden Valley," will situate the 1965 visit, and the media scandal that accompanied it, in the context of a continuity of Soviet-American contacts and, more generally, international circulation of knowledge in the field of computing during the 1950s-60s. The goal of this chapter is not only to provide evidence of the inadequacy of the typical isolationist description of the Soviet computing, but to ask the following questions as well: How did knowledge production a new field such as computing achieve its status of an international scientific discipline? What was the interplay between national and international dimensions of the emerging discipline born in the Cold War context? How did national and disciplinary agendas intersect in scientists' roles as cultural diplomats?

This project studies ACM's essential role as a key institutional intermediary in the shaping of mainframe computers in the United States between the 1940s and the 1970s. So far history of computing has focused innovators and producers of computers and recently users as well. The study of ACM is an essential element in the fellow's book project, "Automating America: Shaping Mainframe Computer Industry and Machine Tool Industry in the United States, 1945 - 1975". In this project, the fellow analyzes how the shaping of mainframe computers and numeric control grew out of a complex set of revolutionary and incremental innovations by individuals acting in networks of companies, research institutions, civilian and military government agencies, and intermediaries. This will produce a new history that will include contributions by individuals in this broad set of organizations.

• "Association for Computing Machinery as an institutional intermediary between the innovators, producers, and users in shaping mainframe computers" accepted for presentation at the SHOT conference in November 2011 in Cleveland, OH.

This project is on a history of surveillance. Surveillance is what today is often called "data surveillance," or the tracking of people through information. With focus on the information practices of the private sector, this research examines the history of credit reporting and credit management, insurance underwriting, labor management, and consumer research, though it also engages the methods of social surveying used by the state and nongovernmental organizations. Surveillance practices in the marketplace emerged in the 1840s. Over the next century, they grew to permit businesses to construct detailed portraits of people as customers, borrowers, clients and workers. Thus, surveillance by information is linked to economic growth and customization of products and services characteristic of advanced economies. But the spread of information about people in the marketplace has also raised fears about privacy. How much the state may legitimately know about citizens is a long standing question in democratic societies. How much private institutions may know is asked less frequently, which this work seeks to change by studying the privacy and computer debates of the post World War II years. In this way, this work provides a deeper historical perspective on issues that are much debated today, but without adequate context.

• The narrative and the algorithm: Genres of credit reporting from the nineteenth century to today (accessed February 2011)

This project aims to complete archival research for a work-in-progress titled "Creating the Federal Computing Complex: The ACM and the Development of Washington¡¯s Government Computer Community," a project that traces the origins and growth of data processing in federal civilian agencies in the decades following World War II, with the intent of understanding how new methods of collecting and managing information with computers changed the national domestic policymaking process. Researching the institutional activities of the ACM's Washington chapter, the outreach of the national ACM to federal employees and agencies, and the society publications and conference preceding that discuss the role and development of computing in government work and policymaking are at the core of my project's agenda.

With the support of an ACM History Fellowship Bernard Geoghegan, a duel-degree doctoral candidate in Screen Cultures (Northwestern University, USA) and medienwissenschaft (Bahaus University, Germany), will prepare the detailed historical account of the ACM Chess Champions. The problem of designing a machine to play chess has fascinated scientists, philosophers, artists and engineers since the 18th century. However, it was not until the initiation of the ACM Chess Championships that chess playing machines became a topic of concerted scientific inquiry and experimentation. Since the first competition, organized by Dr. Monty Newborn and held in New York in 1970, the Chess Competitions have provided an annual forum for leading researchers and laboratories to exchange findings while staging dramatic duels among their chess-playing computers. These events consistently attracted attention from the popular press as well, providing an important occasion for the wider public to learn about computing and participate in debates over human-computer interaction. propose to prepare the first historical and archive-based account of the ACM Chess Competitions. With the support of the ACM, Geoghegan will to investigate how the conferences facilitated the emergence of a number of characteristically "scientific" practices around chess playing machines, including experimentation, exhibition, witnessing, the circulation of research and artifacts, and the cultivation of shared references and techniques.

• A keynote speak "Cybernetic Automata and the Deferred Image of Thought" at research symposium on Cybernetics: From the ontological theatre to the environmental crisis.

Computing is a strategic research area as it is at the center of the relation of science and technology. This project is part of the research for a Ph.D. dissertation that examines a group of distinguished computer scientists-recipients of the Turing Prize (1966-2008), and their paths to contribution and recognition in computer science. This research relies on biographical accounts and archival documents. The study examines the achievements of scientists, their career paths (organizations, publications, honors) and professional affiliations (professional associations and peer networks). The dissertation aims to understand (1) the path such scientists have taken to make their contributions, (2) the range and the types of contributions that are recognized by ACM. With the ACM support the project will investigate the relationship (membership, activities, role within ACM, reception of the award) between Turing Prize winners and the ACM.

• A dissertation chapter "The Formation, History, And Nature Of The Field Of Computing", which examined the role of the ACM and Turing Prize scientists in development of the field of computing.
• A dissertation chapter "Award-Winning Contributions", which described the effort of Turing Prize winners and the ACM in constructing the prize and defining prize-worthy contributions.
• A paper "Social Construction Of The Turing Prize" presented at the Social Studies of Science conference in 2010.