In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts ACM Fellow Ramón Cáceres, a computer science researcher and software engineer. His areas of focus have included systems and networks, mobile and edge computing, mobility modeling, security, and privacy. Most recently he was at Google, where he built large-scale privacy infrastructure. Previously, Ramón was a researcher at Bell Labs, AT&T Labs, and IBM Research. He also held leadership positions in several startup companies. In addition to being the first ACM Fellow from the Dominican Republic, he is an IEEE Fellow and has served on the board of the CRA Committee on Widening Participation in Computing Research. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.
Ramón, who took an indirect path to computer science, shares how he started in computer engineering but grew more interested in software, and how his strong background in hardware helped throughout his scientific and engineering career. He identifies some of the most significant challenges facing privacy and security and sheds lights on his work with the Google team that developed Zanzibar, Google's global authorization system supporting services used by billions of people. Ramón looks toward the future of mobile and edge computing in the next 5-10 years and his particular interest in federated machine learning, which brings together AI and mobile and edge computing. In the wide-ranging interview, he also reflects on growing up in the Dominican Republic and later discovering a love for sailing while in Silicon Valley, shares his efforts to bring underrepresented groups into the field of computing, and offers advice for aspiring software engineers.