This is a cross post with DC2 (https://luma.com/ujzsjljf) - no need to sign up both places. 🙂

Join us for our Responsible AI talk with Professor Patrick Hall. Big thanks to [Data Community DC](https://dc2.org) for joint planning and [Prefect ](https://www.prefect.io/)for providing, space, food, and drinks.

​**📅 Agenda**
6:00 - 6:30 PM - Welcome
6:30- 6:45 PM - Introductions
6:45 - 7:30 PM - Talk
7:30 - 8:00 PM - Wrap up

**Abstract:** Benchmarks are useful, but it’s common sense that they can’t tell us how AI behaves in the real world. Worse, they encourage proxy games and number-chasing (Goodhart’s Law) and can be distorted by task or data contamination. What truly matters are in-situ outcomes and failure modes—privacy leaks, biased or unsafe behavior, misinformation cascades—which static leaderboards rarely reveal. The answer isn’t to abandon benchmarks—they're too valuable for developers—but to extend measurement beyond them: combine model-centric tests with structured red-teaming and user-driven field-testing, then apply context-aware measurement instruments to judge real impact. This talk unpacks the limitations of benchmarks and evals, and offers constructive steps to move past proxy games toward evidence of whether systems work safely, fairly, and reliably where it counts—the real world.

DC Natural Language Processing (DC-NLP)

Andrew Conklin

Helen

Daniel Atherton

Eric

Layne M

Ebtesam

Kwan Yuet Stephen Ho

Tom Folkes

Lana

Kyle

Scott Macdonell

Matt Siniscal

Jorid

Dr.-Ing. Simonas Cerniauskas

bushra naeemi

Nimish Chauhan

Michael Nair

Syed Zaidi

Beyond Benchmarks: Ethics and AI Models in the Real World

Prefect

Join us for an informative evening where local professional, amateur, and student community members (including you!) discuss technical deep-dives, and discussions of AI-related projects or research they are working on, tools and techniques they have tried, or research papers/publications/presentations that they find insightful.

We are not entirely sure that we'll have access to audio/video, so we are planning around not having it. It will be a bonus feature if we do.

Nashville AI Engineering

Dan Denney

Ram C Singh

Josh Frenia

AI Engineering Discussions: What you're working on or experimenting with

Fat Bottom Brewing

Please join us for the Orange County ACM Chapter's bi-monthly evening program series.

**Games as Social Platforms**

**Agenda**
6:30 PM Doors Open & Networking
7:00 PM Announcements, Presentation, and Q&A
8:30 PM Meeting Adjourned

**Event Details**
Over the past twenty years, public perception of videogames has evolved from guilty pleasure to serious platform for learning, social connection, and behavioral change. At the same time, the global contexts in which games are deployed have grown increasingly urgent and complex.

In this talk, I’ll trace that evolution through examples from my own work: from early studies of the intellectual impact of commercial games “in the wild” and the design of after-school game-based programs for youth, to later investigations into how online play can sometimes normalize toxic behaviors, hate, and extremism. That trajectory ultimately led me to reexamine the social dimensions of games in an unexpected setting—one inside San Quentin prison.

Here, I describe my most recent collaboration with incarcerated individuals and correctional staff to understand how a game-based program there, in stark contrast to much commercial online play, has become a space for fostering connection, building emotional regulation, and reducing racial self-segregation. I close with a broader challenge to the audience: To reconsider today’s political divide as much a matter of belonging and not belief, to refocus our attention not on the relational over the ideational.

**Speaker**
**Constance Steinkuehler** is a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine where she researches cognition, culture, and learning in the context of multiplayer videogames. She is the Co-Director of the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center at UCI where she teaches courses on games and society, games as social platforms, the sociology of games (in Donovan Correction Facility), research methods, and visual design. Recent projects include investigations of toxicity and extremism in online commercial games and the design, development and evaluation of game-based programs in incarcerated settings to foster inclusion, equanimity, and social connectedness.

Constance formerly served as Senior Policy Analyst under the Obama administration in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, advising on videogames and digital media. She is the founder of the Federal Games Guild, a working group across federal agencies using games and simulations as tools for thought, and the Higher Education Video Games Alliance, an academic non-for-profit organization of game-related programs in higher education. Her research has been funded by the Anti-Defamation League, the Samueli Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Universities of Cambridge, Wisconsin-Madison, and California-Irvine. She has published over one hundred articles and book chapters including six conference proceedings, four special journal issues, and two books. She has worked closely with the National Research Council and National Academy of Education on special reports relate to videogames, and her work has been featured in *Science*, *Wired*, *USA Today*, *New York Times*, *LA Times*, *ABC, CBS, CNN NPR, BBC* and *The Chronicle of Higher Education*.

Constance has a PhD in Literacy Studies, an MS in Educational Psychology, and three Bachelor’s Degrees in Mathematics, English, and Religious Studies. Her dissertation was a cognitive ethnography of the MMOs *Lineage I* and *II* where she ran a large siege guild. Her husband Dr. Kurt Squire is Co-Director of the GLS center at UCI. They live with their two adolescent gamers in Southern California where they enjoy surfing, hiking, camping, travel, and all manner of headset-wearing, dps-flinging, computer-screened mayhem.

**Co-sponsors**
This event is co-sponsored by the IEEE Orange County Computer Society, SIGAI OC, and the IEEE OC Solid-State Circuit Society (SSCS).

**Venue & Parking**
This meeting will be held at the Knobbe Martens' Irvine offices. Parking validation will be provided to attendees.

Orange County ACM Chapter

Jared Miller

Allen Takatsuka

Daniel Whelan

Marc

Paul

Aryan

Brian Lau

Nick

Russ Walker

Nareg (Nick) Karaguezian

David Wei

Angela

Mike D

Games as Social Platforms

Knobbe Martens

**Agenda:** Join other programmers in the Hudson Valley for a leisurely dinner and informal networking. Recent attendees are of wide-ranging experience, from beginning programmers looking for advice, to veteran programmers, to tech-startup entrepreneurs, to retired senior programmers. Recent attendees have wide-ranging interests, from HTML/CSS/javascript and Excel macros to advanced search algorithms and hard-core object-oriented C++. Discussions have included the merits of various software development methodologies and languages, to the latest security scandal. A running joke is that no meetup is complete until someone mentions the blockchain. We are always interested to hear about your problems, your passions, your projects, and your puzzles.

Don't want dinner? Just order a cup of coffee, or even just a glass of water.

**RSVP:** Our meetings tend to be small. Prospective attendees are encouraged to register in advance at MeetUp.com. That way, we can arrange for everyone to be seated comfortably.

**Normal Schedule:** The last Tuesday of every month.

ACM Poughkeepsie

Bob Cotton

Bill Rubin

Networking Over Dinner

Palace Diner

I decided to re-read the The Art of Computer Programming and decided it would be more fun if I did it in a group. This will be a hybrid event as I know some people in places far away have expressed an interest in participating.

We will be breaking this book down into tiny pieces, it is very dense, but I found it very enjoyable to really understand the science in Computer Science. Periodically there will be special guests to help with some of the math or provide context about how a section has effected them in practice.

Please invite anyone that has expressed an interest in this tomb of knowledge, it will be fun for everyone.

ACM Kansas City

Austin Morgan

Cristy Schneider

Book Club - The Art of Computer Programming

Johnson County Library - Lenexa City Center

ACM Local Network

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