ACM ByteCast

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Nashlie Sephus, Principal Tech Evangelist for Amazon AI focusing on fairness and identifying biases at AWS AI. She formerly led the Amazon Visual Search team in Atlanta, which launched visual search for replacement parts on Amazon Shopping using technology developed at her former start-up Partpic (acquired by Amazon), where she was the CTO. She is also CEO of Bean Path, a nonprofit startup developing the Jackson Tech District, a planned community and business incubator in Jackson, Mississippi. Nashlie earned her PhD from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where her core research areas were digital signal processing, ML, and computer engineering. She has been featured in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, CBS kids’ show Mission Unstoppable, Black Enterprise, Ebony, Amazon Science, AWS re:Invent, Afrotech, and Your First Million podcast, among others. She also serves on several start-up and academic advisory boards along with mentoring others and investing in Atlanta-based start-ups. Her honors and recognitions include the BEYA 2024 Black Engineer of the Year Award, Mississippi Top 50, 2019 Ada Lovelace Award, and Georgia Tech Top 40 Under 40. Nashlie describes her early love for mathematics and music and how these informed her later doctoral research in digital signal processing in music data mining. She shares a personal experience that deeply influenced her work in AI, particularly in responsible AI and fairness, which eventually led her to her current role mitigating bias at Amazon, notably in facial recognition technologies. Nashlie and Rashmi discuss the importance of building diverse teams to practicing responsible AI and building sound products, as well as collaboration with open consortia and organizations such as the Algorithmic Justice League and Black in AI. Nashlie describes the inception and growth of Partpic, an app she started developing while finishing school. She also talks about BeanPath, her nonprofit organization with a mission to bridge the tech gap in Jackson, Mississippi through makerspaces, networking, and community engagement. Links: BeanPath

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes 2024 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award recipient Wen-Mei Hwu, Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was recognized for pioneering and foundational contributions to the design and adoption of multiple generations of processor architectures. His fundamental and pioneering contributions have had a broad impact on three generations of processor architectures: superscalar, VLIW, and throughput-oriented manycore processors (GPUs). Other honors and recognitions include the 1999 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, 2006 ISCA Most Influential Paper Award, 2014 MICRO Test-of-Time Award, and 2018 CGO Test-of-Time Award. He is the co-author, with David Kirk, of the popular textbook Programming Massively Parallel Processors. Wen-Mei discusses the evolution of Moore’s Law and the significance of Dennard Scaling, which allowed for faster, more efficient processors without increasing chip size or power consumption. He explains how his research group’s approach to microarchitecture at the University of California, Berkeley in the 80s led to advancements such as Intel’s P6 processor.  Wen-Mei and Scott discuss the early days of processors and the rise of specialized processors and new computational units. They also share their predictions about the future of computing and advancements that will be required to handle vast data sets in real time, and potential devices that would extend human capabilities.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Harald Störrle hosts ACM Fellow and Software System Award recipient Xavier Leroy, professor at Collège de France and member of the Académie des Sciences. Best known for his role as a primary developer of the OCaml programming language, Xavier is an internationally recognized expert on functional programming languages and compilers, focusing on their reliability and security, and has a strong interest in formal methods, formal proofs, and certified compilation. He is the lead developer of CompCert, the first industrial-strength optimizing compiler with a mechanically checked proof of correctness, with applications to real-world settings as critical as Airbus aircraft. In the past, he was a senior scientist at INRIA, a leading French research institute in computer science, where he is currently a member of the Cambium research team. His honors and recognitions also include the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award and the Milner Award from the Royal Society. Xavier shares the evolution of Ocaml, which grew out of Caml, an early ML (Meta Language) variant, and how it came to be adopted by Jane Street Capital for its financial applications. He also talks about his interest in formal verification, whose adoption in the software industry is still low due to high costs and the need for mathematical specifications. Harald and Xavier also dive into a discussion of AI tools like Copilot and the current limitations of AI-generated code in software engineering. The conversation also touches on ACM’s efforts to become a more global and diverse organization and opportunities to bridge the gap between academia and industry.

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.