Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

Wow. Finally some news about this! Evidence found for everything alleged by the grad student who committed suicide. I hope there are heavy penalities all around, and not just slaps on wrists.https://twitter.com/JBalkind/status/1358855826170023936 …

15 year ACM-wide publishing and service ban for the most serious case.

Do they just ban them without helping the students?? Or do they make sure students have different advisors and so on first?

If the abuser is tenured faculty then he is still going to keep being abusive even if you have taken away one route toward abuse! Not helping students is so dangerous and punishing while not helping students can make an abuser really angry and make him retaliate against them

It's publicly known that the university has been aware of and involved in this case for a long time. While I don't know the details, I believe there has been some coordination between ACM and the university, and I agree that looking out for the students is important there.

A lot of universities are also poorly trained to deal with abuse :(. I just hope at least one person on the ACM side has professional training in dealing with abuse in a way that prevents retaliation. Ideally all university staff also would but that future is far away

I can attest to this from direct experience. Abuse claims aren’t handled well & retaliation is pretty severe. It’s a systematic issue, so it’s unwise to rely on universities for support. Are there external advocates & mentors, that we can put them in touch with?

I would super hope SIGARCH CARES is involved. But I think in this case they should be getting them in touch with professional confidential advocates