Featured ACM Member: Adrien Bousseau
Adrien Bousseau is a Senior Researcher at the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria). He focuses on helping designers communicate with computers. His interests include image creation and manipulation, shape modeling, and scene understanding. Bousseau’s work has been applied in areas including architecture, fashion, and industrial design.
His honors include a Eurographics 2011 PhD award for his research on expressive image manipulations and a Young Researcher Award from the French National Research Agency (ANR) for his work on computer-assisted drawing. In 2016 he received a European Research Council Grant for his project on the interpretation of drawings for 3D design. Bousseau has been a Program Committee Member for the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference for many years, including the upcoming 2024 conference.
Read Harrington’s interview here.
Featured ACM Member: Kurt Mehlhorn
Kurt Mehlhorn was a director of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics for 30 years from 1990 – 2020. He has authored six books and more than 300 publications in areas including algorithms, computational geometry, computer algebra, and theoretical computer science.
His honours include receiving the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, which is considered the most important research award in Germany. He was the recipient of the 2010 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for contributions to algorithm engineering by creating the LEDA Library for algorithmic problem solving and was named an ACM Fellow for important contributions in complexity theory and in the design, analysis, and practice of combinatorial and geometric algorithms.
Read Mehlhorn’s interview here.
ACM ByteCast: Ranveer Chandra
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts 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 been recognized by MIT Technology Review’s Top Innovators Under 35 and was most recently included in Newsweek’s list of America’s 50 most Disruptive Innovators.
Here, 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.
ACM ByteCast: Jacki O’Neill
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.
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, reflects on the establishment and mission of MARI, and the benefits and challenges of collaborating across different multidisciplinary teams, and offers some exciting future directions and visions for computing in Africa and advice for making a social impact in the field.
Listen to ACM ByteCast interviews here or wherever you get your podcasts.
ACM TechTalk: Mae Milano
Register for the next free ACM TechTalk, “Programming Distributed Systems,” presented on Wednesday, March 13 at 12:00 pm ET/5:00 pm UTC by Mae Milano, Assistant Professor at Princeton University.
Our interconnected world is increasingly reliant on distributed systems of unprecedented scale, serving applications which must share state across the globe. And, despite decades of research, programming them is still unsure. In this talk, Milano will show how to use ideas from programming languages to make programming at scale easier, without sacrificing performance, correctness, or expressive power in the process. You’ll see how slight tweaks to modern imperative programming languages can provably eliminate common errors due to replica consistency or concurrency, and how new language designs can unlock new systems designs, yielding both more comprehensible protocols and better performance.
ACM TechTalk: JP Vasseur
View the TechTalk, “The Impact of ML/AI on Networking and the Internet Over the Last Decade” with JP Vasseur.
In the past decade, it’s indisputable that the fields of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have advanced remarkably. Over the last 15 years, we’ve witnessed an explosion of ML algorithms and architectures, which have been widely adopted across various industries, including Healthcare, Vision, and Industrial Automation. This talk aims to provide a comprehensive overview of how ML/AI has been applied in Networking, specifically in areas like Anomaly Detection, Predictive Networking, and Cognitive Networks
ACM TechTalk: Vinod Khosla
View the TechTalk, “Fireside Chat with Entrepreneur/Venture Capitalist Vinod Khosla.”
Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Venturesm, has a dynamic discussion moderated by serial entrepreneur, investor, and futurist Stephen Ibaraki, (ACM Practitioner Board member, Chair of the ACM Professional Development Committee). The chat touches on how the past few years have shaped Vinod’s outlook today on societal reinvention—particularly with regard to OpenAI’s unveiling of capabilities—why he doesn’t trust expert forecasts, where innovation comes from, predictions for the future, and much more.
Visit the TechTalks Archive for our full archive of past TechTalks.
