ACM ByteCast

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.