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Alain Chesnais: Chat: Alain Chesnais Top Global Innovator, Serial Entrepreneur, Executive and Scientist
Alain Chesnais is Past President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He served for the two-year term beginning July 1, 2010. Chesnais studied at l'Ecole Normale Supérieure de l'Enseignement Technique and l'Université de Paris VII and XI, where he earned a Maîtrise de Mathématiques, a Maîtrise de Structure Mathématique de l'Informatique, and a Diplôme d'Etudes Approfondies in Computer Science. He was a high school student at the United Nations International School in New York, where, along with preparing his International Baccalaureate with a focus on Math, Physics and Chemistry, he also studied Mandarin Chinese.

Chesnais recently founded TrendSpottr (Toronto) serving as Chief Scientist, which develops web services to identify real time trends in social media such as Twitter and Facebook. He was the CTO of SceneCaster.com from June 2007 until April 2010 and was Vice President of Product Development at Tucows Inc. from July 2005 — May 2007. He also served as director of engineering at Alias|Wavefront managing the team that received an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for developing the Maya 3D software package.

Prior to his election as ACM president, Chesnais was vice president from July 2008 — June 2010 as well as secretary/treasurer from July 2006 — June 2008. He also served as president of ACM SIGGRAPH from July 2002 — June 2005 and as SIG Governing Board Chair from July 2000 — June 2002. As a French citizen now residing in Canada, he has more than 20 years of management experience in the software industry. He joined the local SIGGRAPH Chapter in Paris some 25 years ago as a volunteer, and has continued his involvement with ACM in a variety of leadership capacities since then.