ACM ByteCast

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.