Association for Computing Machinery

ACM's primary competitor is the IEEE Computer Society. It is difficult to generalize accurately about the distinction between the two, but ACM focuses on theoretical computer science and end-user applications while IEEE focuses more on hardware and standardization issues. Another blunt way to state the difference is that ACM is for computer scientists and IEEE is for electrical engineers, although the largest IEEE subgroup is its Computer Society. Of course, there is significant overlap between the two organizations, and they occasionally cooperate on projects like developing computer science curricula.