Three decades at Oracle, a Stanford degree in history, and a stint growing a university research programme to 840 institutions across 41 countries — that is the profile ACM has chosen to lead the world's largest computing society into its next phase.
Alison Derbenwick Miller takes up the role of Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director on 3 August 2026. The Association for Computing Machinery, with 110,000 members and responsibility for venues including the Turing Award and SIGGRAPH, is making the appointment at a moment it describes as transformative: AI and quantum computing are drawing new disciplines into computing's orbit, and the body that has historically organised around academic computer science needs a leader who can bridge corporate practice, education policy, and basic research.
Her Oracle years give that bridge structural load. She founded Oracle for Research from scratch and grew it to serve 840 institutions across 41 countries. As head of Oracle Academy, she expanded annual student reach from roughly 1.5 million to more than six million participants and secured more than $200 million in Oracle funding for research and education initiatives. She most recently served as Chief Research Officer at Elev8Data. Before the announcement she was Co-Chair of the ACM Education Board and an ACM Council Member-at-Large.
"As AI, quantum computing, and other emerging technologies reshape nearly every aspect of society, the computing community is expanding across industries and academic disciplines," Derbenwick Miller said. "At this moment, ACM's mission has never been more important."
ACM President Elisa Bertino described Derbenwick Miller as having "built global organisations, expanded opportunities in computing education and research, and forged meaningful partnerships across academia, industry, and government." Her academic background spans Stanford (History and Communication) and a Master's in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from UC Berkeley.
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