ACM ByteCast

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Anima Anandkumar, a Bren Professor of Computing at California Institute of Technology (the youngest named chair professor at Caltech) and the Senior Director of AI Research at NVIDIA, where she leads a group developing the next generation of AI algorithms. Her work has spanned healthcare, robotics, and climate change modeling. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NSF Career Award, and was most recently named an ACM Fellow, among many other prestigious honors and recognitions. Her work has been extensively covered on PBS, in Wired magazine, MIT Tech Review, YourStory, and Forbes, with a focus on using AI for good.

Anima talks about her journey, growing up in a house where computer science was a way of life and family members who served as strong role models. She shares her path in education and research at the highly selective IIT-Madras, the importance of a strong background in math in her computing work, and some of the breakthrough moments in her career, including work on using tensor algorithms to process large datasets. Anima spends some time discussing topic modeling and reinforcement learning, what drives her interests, the possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration, and the promise and challenges brought about by the age of generative AI.

In this episode, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast, hosts Sabrina Hsueh and Adela Grando welcome Mor Peleg, Professor of Information Systems at the University of Haifa and Founding Director and Head of its Data Science Research Center. She is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and an international fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI). She received AMIA's New Investigator Award for work on the GLIF3 guideline modeling language. Mor is a renowned researcher in clinical guideline-based decision support.

Initially fascinated by biomedical engineering, Mor shares how she arrived at the intersection of information systems and medicine, after working in IT and completing her postdoctoral research at Stanford. She mentions her recent project, MobiGuide, which aims to narrow the gap between clinical guidance and patient needs by providing 24/7 decision support to patients and providers. Its current focus is on improving the mental wellbeing of cancer patients through evidence-based practices such as exercise, yoga, and positive psychology. Mor also shares advice for people (especially women) looking to work in interdisciplinary fields. She emphasizes the importance of health equity and how AI can be employed in the service of detecting unfairness.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes 2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award Laureate Robert Metcalfe, Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and Research Affiliate in Computational Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Metcalfe received his Turing Award for the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet, the foundational technology of the Internet, which supports more than 5 billion users and enables much of modern life. His other honors include the National Medal of Technology, IEEE Medal of Honor, Marconi Prize, Japan Computer & Communications Prize, ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, and IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal. He is a Fellow of the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Inventors, Consumer Electronics, and Internet Halls of Fame.

In a wide-ranging interview, Bob reflects on his “Ethernet paper” with David Boggs from 1976, and how the interoperability and backward compatibility baked into the Ethernet allows the technology to hold up today, in the age of Netflix and Zoom. Bob also describes his most recent project, modeling geothermal wells as a computational engineer at MIT, with the aim of harnessing geothermal energy as an alternative to fossil fuels. Along the way, they touch on “stretch goals,” GPUs, and how far down “the stack” one needs to go to fully appreciate and understand a piece of technology. 

Link: "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks" (Metcalfe and Boggs' classic 1976 article in Communications of the ACM)

In this episode of ACMByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts H.-S. Philip Wong, the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. He is also Chief Scientist of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), where he was previously Vice President of Corporate Research. His works have contributed to advancements in nanoscale science and technology, semiconductor technology, solid-state devices, and electronic imaging. Philip’s current research covers a broad range of topics including carbon electronics, 2D layered materials, wireless implantable biosensors, directed self-assembly, device modeling, brain-inspired computing, non-volatile memory, and 3D system integration. He is an IEEE Fellow and has received numerous awards, including the J.J. Ebers Award, the IEEE Electron Devices Society’s highest honor recognizing outstanding technical contributions to the field of electron devices that have made a lasting impact.

Philip starts by sharing how he entered the field of electrical engineering, fueled by an interest in science and physics. He talks about the key challenges of scaling down technologies and what he believes will be the next major technological breakthrough, which will create exciting opportunities for those just joining the industry. He discusses the potential of drawing inspiration from biological systems in designing better computing systems and developments in non-volatile memory. Philip also talks about exploring the practical applications of technology in his roles as Faculty Director for Stanford’s NanoFab Lab and Stanford SystemX Alliance, as well as at TSMC. Finally, he offers advice for aspiring engineers and touches on the ethical and environmental implications of some of the biggest emerging trends.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Pattie Maes, a professor at MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences. Pattie runs MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces research group, which does research at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence with a focus on applications in health, wellbeing, and learning. She is also a faculty member in MIT's center for Neuro-Biological Engineering. She has been a researcher, a serial entrepreneur and mentor, a book and journal editor, and a recipient of numerous awards, including recognitions from Newsweek, TIME, AAAI, Fast Company, the World Economic Forum, and Ars Electronica. In addition to her academic endeavors, Pattie co-founded several venture-backed companies, including Firefly Networks, Open Ratings, and Tulip. She is also an advisor to several early-stage companies, including Earable and Spatial.

Pattie recounts her path to computing as one of the first people to major in computer science in Belgium and, later, as the only woman in the AI lab at MIT. She provides historical perspective on the cyclical nature of the field of AI and explains her passion for building systems that make people, rather than machines, more intelligent. She also recalls some of the designs and applied technologies she has worked on throughout her celebrated career, including recommender systems (before web browsers) and wearable devices (before cell phones). Finally, Pattie offers her thoughts on building diverse teams and what she’s most excited about in the field of AI.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award laureates Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. As joint creators of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, they introduced the world to the transformative idea of public key cryptography, the underpinning of every secure transaction on the internet today. Whitfield has spent a large portion of his career as a security practitioner, including roles at Northern Telecom and Sun Microsystems. He is an elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society and a recipient of numerous other awards and accolades in computing. He's currently a consulting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Martin is a Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He's also a recipient of the RSA Lifetime Achievement Award, among many other recognitions. Both have received the Marconi Prize and have been inducted into the National Cybersecurity Hall of Fame and the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Whitfield and Martin share their individual journeys to computer science and cryptography, which were shaped both by personal interests and the geopolitical realities of the time. They also describe how they met and developed a rapport with each other as researchers. They share their “aha moment” in public key cryptography and how the internet  catapulted commercial cryptography in the 1990s. They also share their thoughts on computing privacy, national security, and quantum computing and its implications for both Diffie-Hellman and RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptosystems. They touch on end-to-end encryption and the field of technology in the next five years. Along the way, they share colorful details from their early years and share advice for young people aspiring to get into computing

In this episode, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast, hosts Sabrina Hsueh and Sullafa Kadura welcome Holly Urban, a pediatrician and clinical informaticist. After working for several years as a practicing pediatrician, Holly transitioned to working in product management roles for Healthcare IT vendors, including product leadership roles at McKesson and Hearst Health. Most recently, Holly was Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO) at Oracle Cerner before recently starting a new role as VP of Clinical Product Design at CliniComp.

Holly describes how she became interested in medical informatics, product design, and management and how that inspired her to serve in an ambassador role between clinical and technical teams. She talks about transitioning from her role as CMIO at Oracle Cerner where she focused on software implementation and deployment to designing a new electronic health record (EHR) system at CliniComp. She stresses the importance of data literacy to analyze the reams of data generated by EHR and the promise of AI and ML in measuring effectiveness of interventions such as medical procedures and medications—as well as the issue of bias with these tools. Lastly, Holly shares valuable advice for professionals who are thinking about switching job roles.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts Pat Pataranutaporn, technologist and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There, he explores the intersection of synthetic virtual humans and synthetic biology, specifically at the interface between biological and digital systems. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab and a KBTG Fellow. Pat's research has been published in Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Biotechnology, IEEE, ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM ISWC, ACM Augmented Humans, Royal Society of Chemistry, among others. He also serves as a reviewer and editor for IEEE and ACM publications. Pat’s published research is recognized worldwide and has been featured in the United Nations AI for Good forum, Time magazine, Forbes, National Geographic, FastCompany, The Guardian, Disruptive Innovation Festival, and more.

In the interview, Pat describes how his early fascination with dinosaurs led him into the scientific realm, and later to the MIT Media Lab, where people are encouraged to think about future challenges rather than just focusing on solving current problems. He explains the research area of fluid interfaces and describes some of the innovative work his group has been doing on human-AI co-reasoning. Pat and Bruke also about the future potential of AI in education and wearable devices, as well as MIT’s recent space exploration initiative. Pat also offers his perspectives on art and innovation, identifies the exciting new directions currently holding his attention, and offers advice for young people interested in the field of computing.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts members of team V Bionic, who won the Imagine Cup 2022 grand prize for ExoHeal, a modular exoskeletal hand rehabilitation device that utilizes neuroplasticity and Azure technology to provide adaptive and gamified rehabilitation exercises to people with hand paralysis. The team includes Zain A. Samdani, Founder and CEO, who initially came up with the idea for ExoHeal; Faria Zubair, Head of Design, who improved the design and transformed the prototype to make it feel like a second skin; Asfia Jabeen Zubair, Operations Manager, who provided her ability to deal with people and patients and secured the input and advice of a scientific society comprised of neuroscientists; and Ramin Udash, CTO and application developer, who contributed his expertise in building robotics and applications.

The guests describe their backgrounds and how they got involved in computing and robotics. They explain how ExoHeal works, the biggest challenges the team faced while building it, how it is powered, and, importantly, how they’ve been able to make it portable and affordable. They also discuss what the future holds for their company, including the product launch. Along the way, the discuss how each member was able to contribute their individual talents and experiences to the project and some of the highs and lows of creating ExoHeal.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Neil Trevett, Vice President of Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA and the President of the Khronos Group, a nonprofit consortium publishing open standards in a variety of areas related to computer graphics. He has worked to bring about standardization in the graphics world, giving developers the ability to extend and expand the capabilities of their visual systems. His accomplishments include bringing interactive 3D graphics to the web, creation of the glTF format for 3D assets, and recently founding the Metaverse Standards Forum.

Neil talks about what drew him to computer science and how he became interested in the visual impact of 3D graphics, a field in which he has spent most of his career. He unpacks the evolution of computer graphics and discusses his role at NVIDIA, where his work focuses on helping developers make good use of GPUs. He also explains the benefits of standardization in industry and how open standards can enable innovation and interoperability. Neil also explains how 3D is changing the landscape of e-commerce and online shopping and gives his perspective on the Metaverse and how it can leverage other disruptive technologies.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts Matei Zaharia, computer scientist, educator, and creator of Apache Spark. Matei is the Chief Technologist and Co-Founder of Databricks and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He started the Apache Spark project during his PhD at UC Berkeley in 2009 and has worked broadly on other widely used data and machine learning software, including MLflow, Delta Lake, and Apache Mesos. Matei's research was recognized through the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, an NSF Career Award, and the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Matei, who was born in Romania and grew up mostly in Canada, describes how he developed Spark, a framework for writing programs that run on a large cluster of nodes and process data in parallel, and how this led him to co-found Databricks around this technology. Matei and Bruke also discuss the new paradigm shift from traditional data warehouses to data lakes, as well as his work on MLflow, an open-source platform for managing the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle. He highlights some recent announcements in the field of AI and machine learning and shares observations from teaching and conducting research at Stanford, including an important current gap in computing education.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes research scientist, software engineer, and entrepreneur Yaw Anokwa. Yaw is the founder and CEO of ODK (Open Data Kit), the offline data collection platform that helps fight disease, poverty, and inequity. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Washington and likes to keep his bio short and sweet.

Yaw describes how he felt the urge to pivot his career into a direction of positive social impact as a graduate student at the University of Washington. A volunteer experience with Partners in Health in Rwanda and a software engineering internship at Google showed him the potential for technology to empower people and change lives—specifically through ODK—which became his chief project and passion. Yaw and Scott discuss ODK’s main differentiator, “powerful offline forms,” as well as user interface affordances made to customize ODK for its users, such as rural farmers in Uganda. He also shares the joy of working on a product that focuses on public good and some principles that have helped him to succeed.

Link: https://getodk.org/

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Steve Nouri, Founder of AI4Diversity, Founding Member of Hackmakers, and Chief AI Evangelist at Wand. He’s an award-winning technical leader, data scientist, academic, entrepreneur, and global leader on artificial intelligence. Nouri sits on the Forbes Technology Council, is a committee member at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and was named ICT Professional of the Year Gold Disruptor in 2019 by the Australian Computer Society (ACS). With more than 1 million followers on LinkedIn, he is one of the most influential voices in AI and Data Science.

Steve describes his journey to computing, which started in his teens with computer games, and past work experiences including leading data projects at Data61, Australia’s leading digital research network. He speaks about the importance of building your brand online and how it can create more opportunities for computing professionals. Steve and Rashmi also discuss his Hackmakers hackathons, created during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, he shares his big hopes for AI4Diversity, the growing non-profit organization he founded, with more than 10,000 volunteers from various backgrounds that engage and educate diverse communities about AI to benefit global society.

Links:
AI4Diversity
Hackmakers

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Nuria Oliver, Chief Scientific Adviser in Data Science at the Vodafone Institute, Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance, Scientific Director and Co-Founder of ELLIS (the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems), and Director of the ELLIS Alicante Foundation (the Institute of Humanity-centric AI). Recently, she co-led the winning team of the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge, ValenciaIA4COVID. She has more than 25 year of research experience in AI, HCI, and Mobile Computing. Oliver is the first woman computer scientist in Spain to be named both an ACM Distinguished Scientist and an ACM Fellow. Her research has contributed to the development of intelligent multimodal interfaces, context-aware mobile computing applications, personalized services, and Big Data for Social Good. She holds more than 40 patents and many awards, including the King James I Award in New Technologies and the Abie Technology Leadership Award from AnitaB.org.

Nuria, who was always fascinated by the idea of investigating and solving unsolved problems, shares how she fell in love with AI while studying telecommunications engineering and highlights some of her earlier work on smart cars, smart rooms, and smart clothes. She talks about her recent work helping the government in Valencia, Spain to develop evidence-based policies using data science that were instrumental during the COVID-19 Pandemic, as well as the Data-Pop Alliance, an initiative created by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, MIT Media Lab, and the Overseas Development Institute to use data for social good. Nuria also stresses the importance of inspiring girls to pursue computer science and her own efforts in advocating for diversity in the field.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our new co-host Bruke Kifle, AI Product Manager at Microsoft and member of the ACM Practitioner Board, interviews Michelle Zhou, Co-founder and CEO of Juji, Inc. She is an expert in the field of Human-Centered AI, an interdisciplinary area that intersects AI and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Zhou has authored more than 100 scientific publications on subjects including conversational AI, personality analytics, and interactive visual analytics of big data. Her work has resulted in a dozen widely used products or solutions and 45 issued patents. Prior to founding Juji, she spent 15 years at IBM Research and the Watson Group, where she managed the research and development of Human-Centered AI technologies and solutions, including IBM RealHunter and Watson Personality Insights. Zhou serves as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) and an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), and was formerly the Steering Committee Chair for the ACM International Conference Series on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI). She is an ACM Distinguished Member and Member at Large on the ACM Council.

Michelle presents five inflection points that led to her current work, including the impact of two professors in graduate school who helped her find her direction in AI. She explains what no-code AI means, why the ability for users to customize AI without having coding skills is important, and responds to the critics of no-code AI. Bruke and Michelle then delve into the inception of her AI company that develops AI assistants with cognitive intelligence, Juji, and how it is being used as a platform to introduce AI to early education. Finally, Michelle shares thoughts on the future of software and the no-code movement, as well as the future of AI itself.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes Charu Thomas, Founder and CEO of Ox. Charu is an entrepreneur, researcher, and hacker. Her honors and recognitions include the ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) 2018 Best Paper award, Forbes 30 Under 30, TechCrunch’s SF Disrupt Top Pick in Retail/E-commerce, winner of the Atlanta Startup Battle 3.0, and Collegiate Inventors Competition Finalist.

Charu shares how she got interested in wearable computing while pursuing a degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. She explains how her research with Thad Starner, the inventor of Google Glass, led her to develop an augmented reality platform for order picking, and a vision to build the tools retailers need to transform their brick-and-mortar stores into micro-distribution centers. Charu highlights some people who have been instrumental in her journey from student to CEO, and some of the tools and tricks she’s learned along the way.

Links:
Charu Thomas' award-winning paper in ACM Digital Library.
Charu's blog on order picking.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2020 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award recipient Shyam Gollakota. He is a Torode Professor and leads the Networks and Mobile Systems Lab at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Shyam is the recipient of many awards and recognitions, including a SIGMOBILE Rockstar award, 2021 Moore Inventor Fellowship, MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35, Popular Science ‘brilliant 10,’ and the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list (twice). His group’s research has earned Best Paper awards at many top conferences, appeared in interdisciplinary journals like Nature, Nature Communications, Science Translational Medicine, and Science Robotics, and was named as an MIT Technology Review Breakthrough Technology of 2016 as well as Popular Science top innovations in 2015. Shyam's research covers a variety of topics, including mobile machine learning, networking, human-computer interaction, battery-free computing, and mobile health. He works across multiple disciplines including computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, biology, and medicine. His work has been licensed by ResMed Inc, led to three startups (Jeeva Wireless, Sound Life Sciences, and Wavely Diagnostics), and is in use by millions of users.

Shyam, who didn’t know how to type on a keyboard until the age of 16, relates how he got into CS and discovered that more than just programming, it's also a toolkit people can use to build systems like an artist and solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. He describes his work around the ambient backscatter, which uses existing radio frequency signals to power devices, and wind dispersal powered devices (and how the common dandelion provided inspiration for this research). Shyam and Rashmi also talk about his work on devices used for sleep apnea and tracking and the broader promise of ubiquitous computing in healthcare, such as democratizing medical attention to areas that don’t have the same resources as the Western world. Finally, Shyam gives some insights into the entrepreneurial journey and looks toward the future of healthcare technology.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts ACM Fellow Margo Seltzer, co-recipient of the 2020 ACM Software System Award (shared with Mike Olson of Cloudera and Keith Bostic of MongoDB). She is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, Seltzer was the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Director at the Center for Research on Computation and Society. She is especially renowned for her work on log-structured file systems, databases, and wide-scale caching. Seltzer was previously CTO of Sleepycat Software, developers of the BerkeleyDB embedded database, later acquired by Oracle Corporation. Among her many honors, she is the recipient of the 2020 SIGMOD Systems Award and was recently named one of the “Top 20 Canadian Women in Cyber Security” by IT World Canada.

In the wide-ranging interview, Margo discusses her early years growing up in a high-achieving family and later studying applied mathematics at Harvard (before they had a CS major). She also recalls the amazing time in grad school studying under four legendary professors (including her advisor, Michael Stonebraker), and the origins of BerkeleyDB, which started as a graduate student open-source project and later became Sleepycat Software. Margo emphasizes the importance of taking risks and getting out of your comfort zone (and comfort research area) and inter-disciplinary collaboration, something she encourages in mentoring her students and junior colleagues. She also stresses the responsibility that comes with success and the value of mentoring students and providing guidance for impactful roles in service as well as research.

In this episode, the first of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast, hosts Karmen Williams and Sabrina Hsueh welcome Wendy Chapman, Associate Dean of Digital Health and Informatics at the University of Melbourne and Director of the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health. Her research focuses on developing computer algorithms to understand information typed into electronic medical records and natural language processing of clinical texts. She is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the US National Academy of Medicine.

Wendy discusses her journey from an undergraduate background in linguistics and Chinese literature to completing a PhD in Medical Informatics at the University of Utah and learning to program from scratch. She also describes moving to Australia when saw an opportunity to grow the field of digital health in Melbourne. She identifies the most pressing issues she is faced with in her new role and provides valuable advice based on her most impactful career moves. Wendy also shares with Karmen and Sabrina the development of the Digital Health Validitron at the University of Melbourne, which will guide innovators through questions in order to obtain funding and reimbursement. Finally, she identifies the areas in which ACM and AMIA can partner together in order to create a real impact in the field.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts David Heinemeier Hansson, cofounder and CTO of Basecamp. In addition to his work on this popular project management application, he is also the creator of the open-source web framework Ruby on Rails, used by some of the best-known technology companies, such as Twitter, Shopify, GitHub, Airbnb, and Square, and more than a million other web applications. He is also a prolific author of multiple bestselling books on building and running a successful business, as well as a Le Mans class-winning racecar driver.

David recounts discovering Ruby in the early 2000s and using it to create Basecamp, work which spawned Ruby on Rails. He dives into the process of creating Basecamp, whose aim was to solve the problem of communication with clients, as well as building a self-sustaining community with Ruby on Rails. He also explains his personal approach to open-source software, one of his passions. David also looks back on lessons he learned in business school—including the marketing aspect of technology—and how he applied these lessons to building his own business. He also reveals his experience with remote work and what he’s most excited about for the future.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2017 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award recipient Amanda Randles, the Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Duke University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. She is also Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Duke Cancer Institute. She has received the National Science Foundation Career Award and was selected as one of the 10 researchers to work on the Aurora Exascale Supercomputer. Her visionary work in simulating blood flow through the human body in a system called HARVEY, led her to be featured in the MIT Tech Review Innovators Under 35 list.

Amanda talks about growing up in Michigan and being inspired early on by her high school computer science teacher. She talks about her passion, which lies in using the largest supercomputers in the world to answer questions otherwise left unanswered, and her Duke research group’s focus on building large scale personalized blood flow simulations. She also discusses her 3-year involvement with IBM’s Blue Gene Team, where she learned how to debug programs and identify and work through problems collaboratively, and her time at Harvard University, where she learned about fluid dynamics and started writing HARVEY from scratch. She also describes the fascinating contributions her team made to address ventilator shortages during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes Jelani Nelson, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Theory Group at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Scientist at Google. His areas of interest include the theory of computation, as well as the design and analysis of algorithms, especially for massive datasets. Jelani is a member of ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT)’s Committee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science (CATCS). Among his honors, he won the 2014 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He is the creator of AddisCoder, a computer science summer program for Ethiopian high school students in Addis Ababa.

Jelani and Scott discuss his journey from learning HTML when he was 12 to becoming a theoretical computer scientist. They talk about the spectrum between software engineering and theory and how even theoretical CS research can have an impact on industry practice; teaching his introduction to algorithms course of more than 700 students; running a highly successful algorithmic boot camp for students in Ethiopia to learn coding; and the times he feels most accomplished in his work.

Links:
AddisCoder
People of ACM interview with Jelani Nelson
CATCS
SIGACT

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2020 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award recipient Luiz André Barroso of Google, where he drove transformation of hyperscale computing infrastructure and led engineering for key products like Google Maps. Luiz is a Google Fellow and Head of the Office of Cross-Google Engineering (XGE), responsible for company-wide technical coordination. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Engineering in Google Maps and led the Core team, the group primarily responsible for the technical foundation behind Google's flagship products. Prior to Google, Luiz was a member of the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq, where his group did some of the pioneering work on multi-core architectures. He co-authored The Datacenter as a Computer, the first textbook to describe the architecture of warehouse-scale computing systems. Luiz is a Fellow of ACM and AAAS.

In the interview, Luiz looks back on growing up in Brazil, and how family played a part in his early affinity for electrical engineering which progressed to computer engineering. He recalls his master’s advisor, who stimulated his fascination in Local Area Networks and queuing theory, and how this got him interested in computer science. Luiz also talks about his first job in computing at IBM Research in Rio de Janeiro, and his PhD days at USC in Los Angeles, which got him involved in computer architecture and gave him an early taste of both research and practice in memory systems. He shares of his unique experiences in moving from hardware to software engineering at Google and from areas of high professional expertise to “areas of ignorance,” and how an engineering education prepared him to scale new heights.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2021-2022 ACM Athena Lecturer Ayanna Howard, Dean of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University and founder and President of the Board of Directors of Zyrobotics. Previously she was chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing, where she founded and led the Human-Automation Systems Lab (HumAnS). Before that, she worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). She is a Fellow of AAAI and IEEE. Among her many honors, Howard received the Computer Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award and the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award. Forbes named her to its America's Top 50 Women in Tech list.

In the interview Ayanna looks back on her early love of robotics, inspired by science fiction, teaching herself how to program, and working a high school job at the California Institute of Technology. She shares some of her favorite research projects at JPL, where she designed expert systems, and describes the transition from government/industrial work to academia. She also talks about AI challenges relating to training models and large-scale deployment of lab-tested algorithms—offering warnings for technologists—as well as some potential solutions from her research. Rashmi and Ayanna also touch on her company, Zyrobotics, which develops mobile therapy and educational products for children with special needs, and her book, Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Mounia Lalmas, Director of Research and Head of Tech Research in Personalization at Spotify, leading a team of researchers in content personalization and discovery. Prior to that, she was Director of Research at Yahoo London. She also holds an Honorary Professorship at University College London. Mounia’s work focuses on studying user engagement in areas such as native advertising, digital media, social media, and search, and now audio (music and talk). She is a frequent conference speaker, author, and organizer whose research has appeared at many ACM (and other) conferences, including CIKM, RecSys, SIGIR, SIGKDD, UMAP, WSDM, WWW, and more.

Mounia relates her beginnings in computing as a young student growing up in Algeria, her love for mathematical abstraction, and passion for evaluation and user engagement. She also traces her interest in the field of information retrieval and highlights some of the challenges in building robust recommender systems for music lovers. Mounia and Rashmi also discuss the differences between academic and industrial research, the important role conferences and networking play in computing research, and what excites her most in the fields of personalization research and information retrieval.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Bryan Cantrill, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Oxide Computer Company and a past member of the ACM Queue Editorial Board. Previously, he was Vice President of Engineering and CTO at Joyent. He is known for his work on the award-winning DTrace software, a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for which he was included in MIT Technology Review’s TR35 (35 Top Young Innovators) list.

Bryan describes discovering computing as a kid growing up in the 80s and falling in love with the challenge of solving difficult problems and getting hard programs to work. He talks about DTrace, which he first conceived as an undergraduate at Brown University and co-designed at Sun Microsystems (later acquired by Oracle). He also explains why he thinks open source will conquer every domain, his current challenge of designing a rack-scale computer for the enterprise, and much more.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes 2013 ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Leslie Lamport of Microsoft Research, best known for his seminal work in distributed and concurrent systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual. Among his many honors and recognitions, Lamport is a Fellow of ACM and has received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, the Dijkstra Prize, and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal.

Leslie shares his journey into computing, which started out as something he only did in his spare time as a mathematician. Scott and Leslie discuss the differences and similarities between computer science and software engineering, the math involved in Leslie’s high-level temporal logic of actions (TLA), which can help solve the famous Byzantine Generals Problem, and the algorithms Leslie himself has created. He also reflects on how the building of distributed systems has changes since the 60s and 70s.

Subscribe to the Hanselminutes Podcast: https://www.hanselminutes.com/.

Links:

• Time-Clocks Paper
• Bakery Algorithm
• Mutual Exclusion Algorithm

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Suchi Saria, the John C. Malone Associate Professor of Machine Learning and Healthcare at Johns Hopkins University, where she uses big data to improve patient outcomes. She directs the Machine Learning and Healthcare Lab and is the founding research director of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare. Saria has worked on projects with the NSF, NIH, DARPA, and the FDA and is the founder of Bayesian Health. Her many recognitions include Popular Science magazine’s “Brilliant 10”, the MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35, and World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.

Suchi describes tinkering with LEGO Mindstorm and reading about AI and the future as a child in India and how, years later, she ended up at the forefront of applying machine learning techniques to computational biology. She explains how ML can help healthcare go from a reactive to a predictive and preventive model, and the challenge of making sure that the medical data collected is actionable, interpretable, safe, and free of bias. She also talks about the transition from research to practice and offers her best advice for students interested in pursuing computing.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts past ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award recipient Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, the world's most popular language-learning platform. He is also a Consulting Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Known as one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing, his many recognitions include the MacArthur Fellowship, MIT Technology Review's TR35, and the Lemelson-MIT Prize.

They discuss how he, Manuel Blum, and others at Carnegie Mellon conceived the now famous technology behind reCAPTCHA, the company he founded before Duolingo, and sold to Google in 2009. Von Ahn gives insight into his journey toward harnessing the power of crowdsourcing to provide free, globally distributed language learning. They discuss the dominance of the English language in computing, the benefits and challenges of starting a company in Pittsburgh, some Duolingo user stories Luis has found particularly gratifying, and more.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor at MIT Media Lab where he directs the Camera Culture research group. He holds more than 90 patents in computer vision, computational health, sensors, and imaging, and has co-authored books on Spatial Augmented Reality, Computational Photography, and 3D Imaging. His many awards and recognitions include the prestigious 2004 TR100 (MIT Technology Review), 2016 Lemelson–MIT Prize, and 2017 ACM SIGGRAPH Award.

Raskar discusses the fascinating research field dedicated to capturing and recording the world in new ways. He explains how computer vision provides a new eye and brain to help us both in seeing and processing the world and shares his recent work with extremely high-speed imaging. He also mentions his COVID-19 project: developing privacy-first contact-tracing tools to stem the spread of the outbreak. Raskar also discusses balancing entrepreneurship and research, and his REDX project to bring peer-to-peer invention to his students and advance AI for Impact.

• Follow Ramesh and PathCheck Foundation on Twitter.
• Camera Culture research group at MIT Media Lab.
• PathCheck Foundation (COVID-19 research & technology)

In this episode of ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Denae Ford, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in the Software Analysis and Intelligence Team (SAINTes) group and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Human Centered Design and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. Her research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction and software engineering. In her work she identifies and dismantles cognitive and social barriers by designing mechanisms to support software developer participation in online socio-technical ecosystems. Ford is also a recipient of the National GEM Consortium Fellowship, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship. She is best known for her research on just-in-time mentorship as a mode to empower welcoming engagement in collaborative Q&A for online programming communities, including open-source software and work to empower marginalized software developers in online communities.

In the interview, Ford relates how an undergraduate research project inspired her to pursue a PhD in computing. She describes her approach in designing various research studies, the process she used to identify challenges and barriers to engagement in communities such as StackOverflow and GitHub, and how she and her collaborators went about building interventions. They also discuss how some of these interventions can be applied by industry. Ford also shares some future directions and developments in computing that most excite her—and the possibilities in making the field more equitable and inclusive.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award recipient Jeffrey Heer. Heer is the co-founder of Trifacta, a provider of interactive tools for scalable data transformation, and the Jerre D. Noe Endowed Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he directs the Interactive Data Lab and conducts research on data visualization, human-computer interaction, and social computing. The visualization tools developed by Heer and his collaborators – Vega(-Lite), D3.js, Protovis, Prefuse – are used by researchers, companies, and data enthusiasts around the world.

In the interview, Heer explains how his longstanding interest in psychology and cognitive science led him to focus on human-computer interaction as a student in computing. He describes the deep satisfaction (and fun) of interdisciplinary research drawing on computer science, statistics, psychology, and design, as well as his passion for building open-source tools that people in the real world can use. He also covers some of the challenges particular to building visualizations in the age of big data, starting a company to commercialize academic research, and his current efforts to promote more comprehensive, robust, and transparent analysis results.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts former ACM President Maria Klawe. Now in her 15th year as President of Harvey Mudd College, she is a fellow of ACM, CIPS, AAAS, AMS, and AWM, recipient of numerous awards and 17 honorary doctorates, and serves on the Board of Directors at Microsoft.

In the wide-ranging interview Klawe, who started out in pure mathematics and moved to theoretical computer science, provides not only professional but personal perspectives on balancing research, management, and family responsibilities. She reflects on how roles in both industry (at IBM’s Almaden Research Center) and academia (as Dean of Science at the University of British Columbia and later as Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University) prepared her for her current position. She also describes her famously successful efforts to increase and maintain faculty and student diversity at Harvey Mudd. Finally, Klawe offers some ways of helping traditionally underserved student populations of students gain a foothold in computer science academic programs as well as in industry.

In the latest episode of ACM ByteCast, host Jessica Bell chats with former ACM President Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, an Internet pioneer widely recognized as one of “the fathers of the Internet.” His many recognitions include the ACM A.M. Turing Award, the National Medal of Technology, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Marconi Prize.

Cerf takes us along on an amazing voyage from seeing his first tube-based computer in 1958 to his work on ARPANET and TCP/IP with Bob Kahn, providing a brief history of the Internet in the process. Along the way, he explains how they approached the problem of building a network architecture that scaled astronomically over time. Cerf also points to important social, business, and ethical problems yet to be resolved, and explains why it’s an exciting time to be a student in computing.

In this episode, Rashmi Mohan welcomes ACM Fellow and past ACM-W Athena Lecturer Jennifer Widom, the Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the School of Engineering and Fletcher Jones Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Widom has made significant contributions to databases and data science. She’s a member of the NAE and AAAS, a Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award and EPFL-WISH Foundation Erna Hamburger Prize. Widom has co-authored textbooks widely used for teaching database systems design, use, and implementation, served as editor of top academic journals, and keynoted and chaired major conferences, such as SIGMOD and VLDB.

She discusses her unconventional journey from undergraduate music performance major to computer science doctoral student and researcher at IBM’s Almaden lab, where her interest in databases and information management was cemented. Widom looks back on the heyday of Massively Open Online Courses, when her “Introduction to Databases” class had more than 100,000 enrolled students, and describes some of the challenges that have prevented MOOCs from truly upending higher education. She also describes her unusual sabbatical spent traveling the world and teaching free classes in databases and data science in developing countries, and offers bits of wisdom for those looking for similar experiences.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, host Jessica Bell welcomes 2018 ACM Prize in Computing recipient and 2011 MacArthur Fellow Shwetak Patel. Patel is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington and a director of a health technologies group at Google. He recalls his beginnings as a computer engineer with an interest in both hardware and software, which narrowed to computing during grad school. They discuss how “smart house” technology and working in construction stimulated his interest in building sensors and how applied research enables his work to have a greater social impact. Patel also offers valuable insights on the benefits of academia as a starting point for innovation, the global implications of his work, and advice to people entering his field.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, host Rashmi Mohan is joined by roboticist Robin Murphy, ACM Fellow and recipient of the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions. Murphy is a Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University and Director of the Humanitarian Robotics and AI Laboratory, formerly the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR). She helped found the fields of disaster robotics and human-robot interaction and has deployed robots to major disasters, including the 9/11 World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, and Fukushima.

Murphy details some of the logistical and algorithmic challenges of getting valuable data during disaster response and acting on it at a distance. She also touches on the use of robots during COVID-19, such as providing support for hospital workers. Finally, Murphy shares inspiring advice for kids and younger technologists looking to make a difference with emerging AI methods, and her enthusiasm for the future of robotics.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Jessica Bell talks with widely respected industry thought leader Theo Schlossnagle, Founder and CTO at Circonus, Co-Chair of ACM Queue, member of the ACM Publications Board, and elected Member at Large on the ACM Council. He shares his journey from a love of problem solving to computing and entrepreneurship and how his work at school helping classmates solve difficult problems led him to create his first company and provide solutions to some of the biggest internet businesses in the world. He also provides valuable advice for companies just beyond the start-up phase and to young engineers interested in founding a business.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan welcomes Kristian Lum to the podcast. Lum is part of the research faculty at the University of Pennsylvania's CIS Department. Previously, she was Lead Statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), where she led the project on criminal justice in the United States. She's widely known for her work on algorithmic fairness and predictive policing and is a key organizer of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT).

Lum discusses her transition from math and statistics into computer science, and how her lab work in bioinformatics expanded her interest into social issues. They touch on the sensitive nature of data and privacy and gray areas in criminal justice data collection. Lum mentions some applications of her work, advising the NYC Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice and partnering with the ACLU. She also describes a very timely project accounting for the time lag between COVID-19 infection and death. Finally, she traces her winding, fascinating career path from academic to industry and back.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Jessica Bell is joined by Radia Perlman, ACM Fellow and renowned computer scientist, who has made fundamental contributions to Internet routing and bridging, including work on network resilience. Currently a Fellow at Dell EMC, Perlman is famous for writing the spanning tree protocol (STP), which powers the Ethernet. She reflects on her early days at MIT and later Digital Equipment Corporation, where she worked on DECnet, one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures, and how that inspired her doctoral thesis on routing in the face of malicious network failures. Perlman then relates how she wrote the algorithm behind STP “over a long weekend.” They also discuss the importance of teaching critical thinking in STEM education, healthy corporate culture, and the reciprocal value of mentorship.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan is joined by 1974 ACM A.M. Turing Laureate Donald Knuth, author of the hugely popular textbook series, "The Art of Computer Programming." They discuss what led him to discover his love of computing as well as writing about computer programming, his outlook on how people learn technical skills, how his mentorship has helped him write “human oriented” programs, the problems he is still working to solve, and how his dissatisfaction with early digital typesetting led him to develop TeX, as well as his interest in playing and composing music for the pipe organ.

In this inaugural episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan is joined by 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Laureates John Hennessy and David Patterson. Their conversation touches on the paths that led these two luminaries to pursue computing careers and the "aha moment" that inspired their breakthrough work on RISC microprocessor architecture. They also discuss how they see the future of computing architecture unfolding in the coming years, the need for new memory technologies and better security, the importance of collaboration in innovation, and the promise of the open source community to develop both better software and hardware.