Digital Transformation

Industry sectors (e.g., agriculture, water/power grids, manufacturing, transportation, supply chain) are embracing “digital transformation” (DX). They’re using computing tools to collect real-time data, automate complex decisions, and modernize operations. Unfortunately, today, DX is little more than a collection of loose practices and ad hoc software tools. It’s largely driven by industrial sectors with quite limited engagement from the computing community. Each sector devises its own tooling to transform their operations piecemeal, producing point solutions for each setting, and even well-studied principles in computing have not caught up to DX stacks. This is a grand challenge, and tackling this challenge will pay large dividends for both computing and infrastructures. At its core, digital transformation is a computing problem, and DX presents a lifetime opportunity for computer scientists as a new discipline in the making. DX is the art and science of devising and applying computing techniques, tools, theories, and principles for industrial systems. This requires computing and industrial researchers to deeply engage to jointly establish this nascent area.

To this end, ACM is starting an Emerging Interest Group in Digital Transformation (EIGDX), the precursor to a new SIG (Special Interest Group). The mission of this new community will be two-fold: to identify and translate the latest computing techniques to impact societal infrastructures, and to enrich and extend computing techniques to address real-world issues in infrastructure sectors which are a golden source of research problems.