Newly formed Hyderabad ACM Professional Chapter

We are very excited to announce that the Hyderabad Professional Chapter of the ACM has launched, with a well-attended first event: a talk by Bipin Indurkhya on The Eliza Effect and a Therapeutic Role for Robots. The video will be posted shortly. The event was held at the Google office in Hyderabad, and there were about 95 people in attendance.

Professor P. J. Narayanan (PJN) of IIIT Hyderbad was the catalyst for starting this group. He is a co-chair for the ACM India Council, and he contacted many of his former students and other professional contacts in Hyderabad to generate the interest to start this chapter. There was some discussion between PJN and a few of us at Google, followed by a few organizational meetings attended by a small group but representative of a number of organizations. There is so much happening in IT in Hyderabad that it should be beneficial to have a forum for exchanging ideas. This is only the second active professional chapter of the ACM in India, after that in Bangalore.

Currently, we hope to hold at least one event each month; the canonical time will be the second Thursday of the month. The location will rotate between various organizations. The December event will be a talk with plenty of time for interaction about Cloud Computing, by the Google Engineering Director for Enterprise Apps, Joe Ternasky. An abstract and invitation will be circulated shortly.

We hope to gain a wide spectrum of participation in ACM Hyderabad events at every level, from idea generation, to event hosting. If you have any ideas for events or activities, or are willing to speak or to host an event, please send mail to hyderabad-acm-officers@googlegroups.com, or to any of the officers directly. In this initial period, we are not collecting any dues, so we will host only events that have a sponsor, or do not require a budget.

Meanwhile, Vadali VRL Swamy has been volunteering his time to build a web site for the chapter; watch this space for that! And many thanks to Swamy for his time and expertise!

Until then, watch our mailing lists on the Hyderabad ACM google group. You can also join the LinkedIn or Facebook group for the chapter!