ACM ByteCast Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

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.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes ACM Fellow Rosalind Picard, a scientist, inventor, engineer, and faculty member of MIT’s Media Lab, where she is also Founder and Director of the Affective Computing Research Group. She is the author of the book Affective Computing, and has founded several companies in the space of affective computing, including the startups Affectiva and Empatica, Inc. A named inventor on more than 100 patents, Rosalind is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Her contributions include wearable and non-contact sensors, algorithms, and systems for sensing, recognizing, and responding respectfully to human affective information. Her inventions have applications in autism, epilepsy, depression, PTSD, sleep, stress, dementia, autonomic nervous system disorders, human and machine learning, health behavior change, market research, customer service, and human-computer interaction, and are in use by thousands of research teams worldwide as well as in many products and services.In the episode, Rosalind talks about her work with the Affective Computing Research Group, and clarifies the meaning of “affective” in the context of her research. Scott and Rosalind discuss how her training as an electrical with a background in computer architecture and signal processing drew her to studying emotions and health indicators. They also talk about the importance of data accuracy, the implications of machine learning and language models to her field, and privacy and consent when it comes to reading into people’s emotional states.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2021 ACM Fellow Edward Y. Chang, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. Prior to this role, he was a Director of Google Research and President of HTC Healthcare, among other roles. He is the Founder and CTO of Ally.ai, an organization making groundbreaking moves in the field using Generative AI technologies in various applications, most notably healthcare, sales planning, and corporate finance. He’s an accomplished author of multiple books and highly cited papers whose many awards and recognitions include the Google Innovation Award, IEEE Fellow, Tricorder XPRIZE, and the Presidential Award of Taiwan. Edward also also credited as the inventor of the digital video recorder (DVR), which replaced the traditional tape-based VCR in 1999 and introduced interactive features for streaming videos.
Edward, who was born in Taipei, discusses his career, from studying Operations Research at UC Berkeley to graduate work at Stanford University, where his classmates included the co-founders of Google and where his PhD dissertation focused on on a video streaming network that became DVR. Later, at Google, he worked on developing the data-centric approach to machine learning, and led development of parallel versions of commonly used ML algorithms that could handle large datasets, with the goal of improving the ML infrastructure accuracy to power Google’s multiple functions. He also shares his work at HTC in Taipei, which focused on healthcare projects, such as using VR technology to scan a patient’s brain; as well as his current interest, studying AI and consciousness. He talks about the challenges he’s currently facing in developing bleeding edge technologies at Ally.ai and addresses a fundamental question about the role of human in a future AI landscape.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts Jacki O'Neill, Director of the Microsoft Africa Research Institute (MARI) in Nairobi, Kenya, where she is building a multi-disciplinary team combining research, engineering, and design to solve local problems globally. Her research interests span AI, HCI, social science, and technology for emerging markets. An ethnographer by trade, Jacki has focused on technologies for work—with the aim of making work better; and technologies for societal impact, with the aim of supporting underserved communities. She has led major research projects in the future of work from new labor platforms to workplace AI and chat; digital currencies and financial inclusion; and Global Healthcare. She has received two innovation awards and 16 patents (from new interaction mechanisms to crowdsourcing), and has served on the program and organizing committees of major conferences such as CHI, CSCW, ICTD, and ECSCW for many years.
In the interview, Jacki traces her path from her early days growing up in Plymouth, UK to discovering an interest in computing at the University of Manchester after initially studying psychology. She describes how her background has influenced her approach in the design of technology and some primary methodologies she has used. Jacki reflects on the establishment and mission of MARI, and the benefits and challenges of collaborating across different multidisciplinary teams. She also shares what she sees as the biggest opportunities for technology in Africa and what local problems can be solved, touching on her approach to cross-cultural differences such as AI and equitable language systems. Finally, Jacki offers some exciting future directions and visions for computing in Africa and advice for making a social impact in the field.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2022 ACM Fellow Ranveer Chandra, Managing Director for Research for Industry and CTO of Agri-Food at Microsoft. He also leads Microsoft’s Networking Research Group and has shipped multiple products over the years. He has authored more than 100 papers and patents and won numerous awards, including the Microsoft Gold Star award. He has been recognized by MIT Technoloy Review’s Top Innovators Under 35 and was most recently included in Newsweek magazine’s list of America’s 50 most Disruptive Innovators.
Ranveer shares his journey, from growing up in India, where he began to appreciate the agricultural industry during the summers he spent with his grandparents, to his PhD thesis on VirtualWifi, which uses TV white spaces to bring internet connectivity to homes without WiFi. He explains how his experience interviewing farmers inspired him to work on technology that takes some of the guesswork out of their work using data and AI, and to come up with solutions that help the agriculture industry become more productive, profitable, and climate friendly. Ranveer talks about the phases of product development for his team at Microsoft. He also offers some insights on how recent breakthroughs in AI, such as generative models, can help farmers in countries like India, and shares what he’s most excited about in the application of AI to agriculture and the food ecosystem.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts 2022 ACM Prize in Computing recipient Yael Tauman Kalai, Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Adjunct Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her main research interests are cryptography, the Theory of Computation, and security and privacy. She is especially known for her work in verifiable delegation of computation, where she has developed succinct proofs that certify the correctness of any computation. In addition to making breakthroughs in the mathematical foundations of cryptography, her proofs have been practically useful in areas such as blockchain and cryptocurrency.
Yael shares her career journey in computer science, which is rooted in a love of mathematics, and how the field of cryptography provided philosophically interesting questions with applicable research outcomes. She describes her work on ring signatures, a key component of numerous blockchain-based systems that added privacy to the chain, which she co-invented with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir. Yael also touches on AI and large language models (LLMs), different methods of verification, how she values her own work, and how she balances her roles between academia and industry. She also reveals some concerns around quantum computing and what she sees as the most exciting emerging areas of cryptography.