ACM ByteCast

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes ACM Fellow Juan Gilbert, the Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and Chair of the Computer & Information Science & Engineering Department at the University of Florida where he leads the Computing for Social Good Lab. The lab’s innovations include open-source voting technology to help make elections more secure, accessible, and usable; making voting technologies more transparent; increasing fairness and reducing bias in ML algorithms used in admissions and hiring decisions; and reducing conflicts during traffic stops. Gilbert’s many honors and recognitions include the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, the CRA A. Nico Habermann Award, and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation (NMTI). Juan shares with Scott his surprise at being nominated for the NMTI, which he received in 2023 from President Joe Biden for pioneering a universal voting system that makes voting more reliable and accessible for everyone and for increasing diversity in the computer science workforce. He talks about his lab’s mission to change the world by solving real-world problems, and principles such as “barrier-free design” that he and his collaborators applied to his lab’s voting machine technology. They also discuss how his Application Quest (AQ) technology uses AI to help make fairer hiring decisions, and how his students’ Virtual Traffic Stops app helps protect both drivers and law enforcement safe during traffic stops. Juan also explains how he and his lab choose which projects they work on and teases the promise of brain-computer interaction technology.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio, Professor at the University of Montreal, and Founder and Scientific Director of MILA (Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) at the Quebec AI Institute. Yoshua shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their work on deep learning. He is also a published author and the most cited scientist in Computer Science. Previously, he founded Element AI, a Montreal-based artificial intelligence incubator that turns AI research into real-world business applications, acquired by ServiceNow. He currently serves as technical and scientific advisor to Recursion Pharmaceuticals and scientific advisor for Valence Discovery. He is a Fellow of ACM, the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Canada, Officer of the Order of Canada, and recipient of the Killam Prize, Marie-Victorin Quebec Prize, and Princess of Asturias Award. Yoshua also serves on the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board for Independent Advice on Breakthroughs in Science and Technology and as a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.  Yoshua traces his path in computing, from programming games in BASIC as an adolescent to getting interested in the synergy between the human brain and machines as a graduate student. He defines deep learning and talks about knowledge as the relationship between symbols, emphasizing that interdisciplinary collaborations with neuroscientists were key to innovations in DL. He notes his and his colleagues’ surprise in the speed of recent breakthroughs with transformer architecture and large language models and talks at length about about artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the major risks it will present, such as loss of control, misalignment, and nationals security threats. Yoshua stresses that mitigating these will require both scientific and political solutions, offers advice for researchers, and shares what he is most excited about with the future of 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 Karmen Williams welcome Francesca Rossi, IBM Fellow and AI Ethics Global Leader, and current President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Rossi works at the Thomas J. Watson IBM Research Lab in New York. Her research interests focus on artificial intelligence, especially constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, and collective decision making. She is also interested in ethical issues in the development and behavior of AI systems. She has published more than 200 scientific articles in journals and conference proceedings and is a fellow of both AAAI and EurAI. Rossi has been the president of the International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI), an Executive Counselor of AAAI, the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of AI Research, and serves n the Board of Directors of the Partnership on AI. She has also served as a program co-chair and steering committee member of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society (AIES). Francesca shares how experiences with multidisciplinary work in computer science drew her to AI and ethics, and the challenges of synchronizing with people from a variety of different backgrounds at IBM. She also talks about her involvement in the development of AI ethics guidelines in Europe. She walks through some of her concerns around building ethical and responsible AI, such as bias, lack of availability, transparency of AI developers, data privacy, and the accuracy of generated content. Francesca emphasizes the importance of researchers working more closely with policymakers and the important role of conferences such as AIES (a collaboration between AAAI and ACM). She also offers suggestions for those interested in getting more engaged in AI ethics and recommendations for people interested in an AI career path, and advocates for common benchmarks that can help evaluate AI.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts Partha Talukdar, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google Research India, where he leads a group focused on natural language processing (NLP), and an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore. Partha was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Machine Learning Department and received his PhD in computer information science from the University of Pennsylvania. He is broadly interested in natural language processing, machine learning, and making language technologies more inclusive. Partha is a co-author of a book on graphs-based learning and the recipient of several awards, including the ACM India Early Career Researcher Award for combining deep scholarship of NLP, graphical knowledge representation, and machine learning to solve long-standing problems. He is also the founder of Kenome, an enterprise knowledge graph company with the mission to help enterprises make sense of big dark data. Partha shares how exposure to language processing drew him to languages with limited resources and NLP. He and Bruke discuss the role of language in machine learning and whether current AI systems are merely memorizing and reproducing data or are actually capable of understanding. He also talks about his recent focus on inclusive and equitable language technology development through multilingual-multimodal Large Language Modeling, including Project Bindi. They discuss current limitations in machine learning in a world with more than 7,000 languages, as well as data scarcity and how knowledge graphs can mitigate this issue. Partha also shares his insights on balancing his time and priorities between industry and academia, recent breakthroughs that were impactful, and what he sees as key future achievements for language inclusion.

Special guest Rosalind Picard, inventor and engineer, joins host Scott Hanselman to discuss affective computing, human emotions, ethical AI interactions, monitoring blood sugar levels with wearable tech, navigating AI and emotions, and the significance of facial expressions in communication and learning.

Edward Y. Chang, a prominent figure in computer science, discusses his journey from studying operations research to leading AI advancements at Google. He shares insights on developing generative AI technologies, exploring the potential of AI in healthcare and investment banking, and the importance of human collaboration in AI-driven systems.

Jacki O'Neill, Director of Microsoft Africa Research in Nairobi, discusses her journey blending research, engineering, and design to address local/global challenges in AI, HCI, and technology for emerging markets. She emphasizes ethnography for effective tech design, user-centered design for global impact, and the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration. O'Neill explores the socio-tector model in African small businesses and advocates for technology for social impact, guiding young professionals towards impactful careers.

2022 ACM Fellow Ranveer Chandra discusses his journey from India to leading Microsoft's Agri-Food initiatives. He talks about using AI to empower farmers, bridging connectivity gaps with TV white spaces, and the transformative potential of AI in agriculture and food production.

Yael Tauman Kalai, a cryptography expert, discusses her career journey, work on blockchain privacy with ring signatures, concerns around quantum computing, and exciting emerging areas in cryptography. She touches on the balance between academia and industry, verification methods, and the intersection of AI and cryptography.

Noriko Arai, a professor in the Information and Society Research Division of the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan, discusses being a creative in academia, the impact of AI, mentors and colleagues who inspired her, essential skills and ethics in AI research, and the challenges faced by female researchers in IT and the gender gap in Japan.