On June 25, 2017 Luigi De Russis partecipated at the inaugural meeting of the ACM Future of Computing Academy (ACM FCA), in San Francisco. Together with the other 45 academy members, he was also invited to take part at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the A. M. Turing Award (from the 23th to the 24th of June, in San Francisco).

There were three intense and interesting days. In the first two days - the Turing Award celebration - academy members had the opportunity of meeting some Laureates and listen to their public presentations and talks. Talks cover various topics of Computer Science, ranging from Deep Neural Networks, to the "death" of Moore's Law, to Quantum Computing, and Augmented Reality. Videos of the talks are available on the event website and on a dedicated YouTube playlist.

The inaugural meeting, instead, was more practical. ACM FCA members met for the first time, so they needed to figure out what they wanted to work on. ACM FCA, in fact, is a platform that enables the next generation of researchers, practitioners, educators, and entrepreneurs to develop a coherent and influential voice to address challenging issues facing the computer science field and society in general. ACM FCA members went both from academia and from industry and should "become the voice of the future of the computing field at large and of ACM specifically".

After some introductory talks and a brief discussion about the ACM FCA bylaws, academy members split in groups and started proposing some areas and ideas to work on. Several areas emerged, ranging from educational initiatives to the future of work. Academy members discussed them and formed six working groups, at the end. Each group, then, started to set some middle and long-term actions and goals, to effectively start to tackle the issues they identified in these areas. To have a brief "behind the scene" overview of the inaugural meeting, you can have at look at the #acmfca tag on Twitter. 

Stay tuned on http://www.acm.org/fca to discover what academy members are preparing!