For years, Person of Interest has been right on the cutting edge between commenting on current events and speculating about the future. With its final season, the show is depicting a futuristic nightmare--and yet, it's also more topical than ever before. We talked to producers Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman, and they told us the real villain of Person of Interest is Facebook. First off, I've seen the season premiere of Person of Interest, which airs next Tuesday, May 3. True to form, it's a brilliant hour of television that will keep you throwing things at your TV screen as the Machine Gang struggles to come back from their devastating loss at the end of season four. The super-intelligent Machine, which was built to predict terrorist threats but wound up trying to save ordinary people from smaller crimes, has been destroyed, and the race to reconstruct it from some memory chips is as intense as any thriller I've seen in ages. I honestly don't know what I can say about Person of Interest that we haven't said a dozen times before--this is one of the best science fiction shows of the past decade.

For years, Person of Interest has been right on the cutting edge between commenting on current events and speculating about the future. With its final season, the show is depicting a futuristic nightmare--and yet, it's also more topical than ever before. We talked to producers Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman, and they told us the real villain of Person of Interest is Facebook. First off, I've seen the season premiere of Person of Interest, which airs next Tuesday, May 3. True to form, it's a brilliant hour of television that will keep you throwing things at your TV screen as the Machine Gang struggles to come back from their devastating loss at the end of season four. The super-intelligent Machine, which was built to predict terrorist threats but wound up trying to save ordinary people from smaller crimes, has been destroyed, and the race to reconstruct it from some memory chips is as intense as any thriller I've seen in ages. I honestly don't know what I can say about Person of Interest that we haven't said a dozen times before--this is one of the best science fiction shows of the past decade.

Nathan Ensmenger is a professor at Indiana University who has specialised in the social and historical aspects of computing. In his book "The Computer Boys Take Over", he explores the origins of our profession, and how programmers were first hired and trained: Little has yet been written about the silent majority of computer specialists, the vast armies of largely anonymous engineers, analysts, and programmers who designed and constructed the complex systems that make possible our increasingly computerized society. The title of the book is a reference to where it all started: With the "Computer Girls". The women programming the ENIAC -- one of the very first electronic, general purpose, digital computers -- are widely considered to be the first programmers. At the time, the word "programmer", or the concept of a program, did not even exist yet.

In his many years as an artificial intelligence researcher, Eric Horvitz has worked on everything from systems that help determine what's funny or surprising to those that know when to help us remember what we need to do at work. On Wednesday, Horvitz, a technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, research lab, received the ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award for groundbreaking contributions in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. The award honors Horvitz's substantial theoretical efforts and as well as his persistent focus on using those discoveries as the basis for practical applications that make our lives easier and more productive. Harry Shum, the executive vice president of Microsoft's technology and research group, said Horvitz epitomizes a style of research that is unique to places like Microsoft because it is focused on having an impact in both the research and industry domains. "People talk about basic research and applied research. What we are doing here is Microsoft research," Shum said.

When British mathematician Sir Andrew J. Wiles was awarded the Abel Prize Laureate in math on 15 March for cracking a centuries-old hypothesis, a friend asked me, "Why did he get the prize, and will this solve any real-world problem?" Quoting from the statement that the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters gave to the press, I told him that 63-year-old Wiles had been given the annual award "for his stunning proof of (French mathematician Pierre de) Fermat's last theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semi-stable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory". So let me try to simplify it a bit. Number theory--also sometimes referred to as the "queen of mathematics" or "higher arithmetic"--is a branch of pure math, devoted primarily to the study of the properties of whole numbers. Fermat--a prominent mathematician of the 17th century--contributed significantly to number theory, probability theory, analytic geometry and the early development of infinitesimal calculus. Fermat's last theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an bn cn for any integer value of n that is greater than two.

Andrew Moore was a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University for a dozen years when Google hired him away in 2006 to lead some of its efforts around ad targeting and fraud prevention. CMU lured Moore back in 2014, making him the dean of its computer science school. But he still understands well what goes through his colleagues' minds when industry comes calling, and he says the battle to keep them in academia grows fiercer by the year. Earlier today, we talked with Moore about Uber, which famously raided the school's robotics department a year ago, poaching 40 of its researchers and scientists. We also talked about how Moore entices people to stay, and the newest new thing his 2,000-student school is focused on right now.

Andrew Moore was a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University for a dozen years when Google hired him away in 2006 to lead some of its efforts around ad targeting and fraud prevention. CMU lured Moore back in 2014, making him the dean of its computer science school. But he still understands well what goes through his colleagues' minds when industry comes calling, and he says the battle to keep them in academia grows fiercer by the year. Earlier today, we talked with Moore about Uber, which famously raided the school's robotics department a year ago, poaching 40 of its researchers and scientists. We also talked about how Moore entices people to stay, and the newest new thing his 2,000-student school is focused on right now.

The ACM constitution provides that our Association hold a general election in the even-numbered years for the positions of President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer, and Members-at-Large. Biographical information and statements of the candidates appear on the following pages (candidates' names appear in random order). In addition to the election of ACM's officers--President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer--five Members-at-Large will be elected to serve on ACM Council. Please refer to the instructions posted at https://www.esc-vote.com/acm2016. To access the secure voting site, you will need to enter your email address (the email address associated with your ACM member record) and your unique PIN provided by Election Services Co. Please return your ballot in the enclosed envelope, which must be signed by you on the outside in the space provided. The signed ballot envelope may be inserted into a separate envelope for mailing if you prefer this method. All ballots must be received by no later than 16:00 UTC on 24 May 2016. Validation by the Tellers Committee will take place at 14:00 UTC on 26 May 2016. Vicki Hanson is a Distinguished Professor of Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology, U.S. (since 2013), Professor and Chair of Inclusive Technologies, Computing, University of Dundee, U.K. (since 2009), and an IBM Research Staff Member Emeritus (since 2009). Previously, she was Research Staff Member and Manager, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (1986–2008), Research Associate, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT (1980–86), and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1978–80). Vicki is the ACM Vice President. She also currently serves as a member of the ACM Executive Committee and Council, on the ACM-W Europe Executive Committee, and on the ACM Fellows Awards Committee (Chair, 2015). She is Vice President at Large of ACM SIGCHI and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. She has served on the SIG Governing Board Executive Committee (2005–14; SGB Chair 2010–12), and as Chair of SIGACCESS, where she revitalized the SIG and established a successful annual conference (ASSETS). She co-founded the field's premier archival journal (ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing) and served as Associate Editor of ACM TWEB. She was on the organizing committee for several SIGPLAN OOPSLA conferences, chaired the recent ACM CEO Search Committee, and currently serves on the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows committee (since 2013; Convener 2015). She is an ACM Fellow, a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Senior Member of IEEE.

In popular books, academic articles, a TED talk, and countless lectures, the prominent Dutch primatologist Frans De Waal has spent his career showing just how many capacities and traits once thought to be distinctly human – from face-recognition to inequality aversion – are in fact broadly shared by many other species of primates. His new book, "Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are" argues that impressive forms of animal intelligence occur throughout the animal kingdom, not simply in the primate order. Our own preconceptions may be the main obstacle to recognizing animal intelligence. Until the 1980s researchers usually described animals with the terms "learning" and "instincts" but not "cognition." That's changed – now almost every week there's a new finding in animal cognition.

Hanson Robotics touted their android, Sophia, at this year's SWXW in Austin, Texas. The android is arguably the most human like robot to date, capable of masking 62 different facial expressions. Fundamentally, Sophia was designed to be "as conscious, creative and capable as any human," according to to CEO of Hanson Robotics, David Hanson. In addition to her various facial expressions, Sophia can recognize people, hold eye contact, carry on intelligent conversations with speech recognition software and is even capable of learning. Sophia is clothed in a patented silicon skin called Frubber, an elastic form of rubber used in robotics.