Published: June 21, 2021

Ellen Do​Ellen Do, professor of computer science with the ATLAS Institute and director of the ACME Lab, has a long history of doing community outreach and service for the ACM Creativity & Cognition Conference, and this year is no exception. For C&C'21, held virtually from June 22-23, Do is the virtual conference co-chair, graduate student symposium co-chair and publicity co-chair. She is also serving on the conference steering committee.

Remarkably, since 2009, Do has been on the organizing committee of every C&C conference, which since 1993 has brought together artists, scientists, designers, educators and researchers to more deeply understand how people engage individually and socially in creative processes and how computation and other technology can affect creative outcomes. Her service includes the C&C 2009 at Berkeley (treasurer); C&C 2011 in Atlanta (graduate student symposium chair); C&C 2013 in Sydney (program committee co-chair); C&C 2015 in Glasgow (program chair);  C&C 2017 in Singapore (associate chair); and C&C 2019 (publicity co-chair).

With 15 C&C papers published to-date, Do also carries the distinction of being the most frequent author for this conference series. She presented her first paper in 2007 in Washington, DC to C&C with Mark Gross, director of the ATLAS Institute and professor of computer science, titled Environments for creativity: a lab for making things, and was later invited to publish a journal article, Educating the New Makers: Cross-Disciplinary Creativity, for the Journal of Leonard, MIT press.

This year C&C's theme highlights how human and computational aspects of creativity can beneficially impact our communities and cultures, and how human experience impacts and is impacted by processes of creatively forming and solving problems, designing spaces, and building new possibilities.