ACM TechTalk: Rush Shahani
View the recent ACM Techtalk(register to view on demand), “Research to Reality: Building Production-Ready LLM Apps Users Can Trust,” with Rush Shahani, CTO and Co-Founder of Persana AI.
Large Language Models have revolutionized AI applications, but transitioning from research prototypes to production-ready systems presents significant challenges in reliability, accuracy, and deployment readiness. This talk presents battle-tested strategies for building trustworthy LLM applications, with a special focus on RAG pipelines, chatbots, and AI agents. Drawing from real-world implementations across different industries, Shahani explores practical techniques for minimizing hallucinations, optimizing performance, and ensuring ethical deployment.
ACM TechTalk: Christine Robson
View the recent ACM Techtalk, “Product Management in the AI Era” with Christine Robson, Product Manager Director for AI Data at Google.
In recent years, AI developer tools have progressed from research projects to critical parts of the developer toolset. Today, there are over 1.8 million paid subscribers to GitHub Copilot, Google reports that 50% of their code is written with AI assistance, and TabNine estimates that 5% of all code is written by AI. Researchers in the machine learning, programming languages, and software engineering communities continue to push the boundaries of what is possible, but turning promising research results into tools that are useful at scale is hard. It involves determining the right use cases, designing the right UX, evaluating and improving quality, and many other factors.
In this talk, Robson discusses how to bridge the demo-to-real-world gap via lessons learned from building several AI developer tools at GitHub, including the original GitHub Copilot, Copilot for Docs, and Copilot Workspace.
ACM ByteCast: Xin Luna Dong
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts ACM and IEEE Fellow Xin Luna Dong, Principal Scientist at Meta Reality Labs. She has significantly contributed to the development of knowledge graphs, a tool essential for organizing data into understandable relationships. Prior to joining Meta, Luna spent nearly a decade working on knowledge graphs at Amazon and Google. Before that, she spent another decade working on data integration and cleaning at AT&T Labs. She has been a leader in ML applications, working on intelligent personal assistants, search, recommendation, and personalization systems, including products such as Ray-Ban Meta. Her honors and recognitions include the VLDB Women in Database Research Award and the VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award.
Here, she shares how early experiences growing up in China sparked her interest in computing, and how her PhD experience in data integration lay the groundwork for future work with knowledge graphs. She also discusses the relevance and structure of knowledge graphs, and her work on Google Knowledge Graph and Amazon Product Knowledge Graph. She also shares her passion for making information access effortless, especially for non-technical users such as small business owners, and suggests some solutions.
Featured ACM Member: John Crowcroft
John Crowcroft Jonathan Crowcroft is the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Lab at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, and the Chair of the Program Committee at the Alan Turing Institute. Crowcroft is a leading figure in computer networks and distributed systems. He is credited with fundamental contributions to rural broadband, helping extend the Internet to multimedia, and founding the field of opportunistic networking.
Among his honors, Crowcroft was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, a chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He was named an ACM Fellow (2002) for contributions to the design and analysis of network protocols and for technical leadership. He received the ACM SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Contribution (2009) for pioneering contributions to multimedia and group communications.
In his interview, he discusses the Internet’s current challenges with respect to bandwidth, ensuring data security in the cloud, the genesis of the ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law, and more
