ACM ByteCast: Jennifer Chayes
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts ACM Fellow and ACM Distinguished Service Award recipient Jennifer Chayes, Dean of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society at UC Berkeley. Before joining Berkeley, she co-founded the Theory Group at Microsoft Research Redmond and later founded and led three interdisciplinary labs: Microsoft Research New England, New York City, and Montreal. Her research areas include phase transitions in CS, structural and dynamical properties of networks including graph algorithms, and applications of ML. Jennifer is one of the inventors of the field of graphons, widely used for the ML of large-scale networks
Here, Jennifer shares her early experience as the child of Iranian immigrants, dropping out of high school and learning to embrace risk. She describes her journey from being a pre-med biology major to a PhD in mathematical physics, how her love of theory and an interest in interdisciplinary work led her to start a Theory Group at Microsoft Research, how her later interest in economics and game theory led to the founding of Microsoft Research New England, the challenges she has navigated throughout her career, and how that has influenced her approach to interdisciplinary research.
ACM ByteCast: Roger Dannenberg
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts ACM Fellow Roger Dannenberg, a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Art & Music at Carnegie Mellon University. Dannenberg is internationally renowned for his research in computer music, particularly in the areas of programming language design, real-time interactive systems, and AI music. Throughout his career, he has developed innovative technologies that have revolutionized the music industry and is known for creating Audacity, the widely known and used audio editor. He is also an accomplished musician and composer, having performed in prestigious venues around the world.
Here, he traces his two lifelong passions for computer science and music, and his fascination with the connection between sound, mathematics, and physics, describes the signal changes in interactive computer music, talks about some recent projects in music analysis and composition, reflects on his role as an academic and advisor, and more.
Listen to ACM ByteCast interviews here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Featured ACM Member: Abhik Roychoudhury
Abhik Roychoudhury is Provost’s Chair Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS). His interests include software testing and analysis, and more generally trustworthy software systems. Roychoudhury’s research group has also made significant contributions to fuzzing and symbolic execution, and their usage in software testing/automatic programming. In this area, his group has been honored with various awards including an ICSE Most Influential Paper Award (10 Year Test-of-Time Award) for automated program repair.
Roychoudhury is an ACM Distinguished Member and serves as the Steering Committee Chair for the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ACM FSE). On January 1, 2025, he became Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (ACM TOSEM). TOSEM publishes papers on all aspects of building large, complex software systems.
Roychoudhury was recently named a 2024 ACM Fellow for contributions to software testing and analysis, including automated program repair and fuzz testing.
In his interview, he discusses automated program repair methods, researching fuzzing and software security, the Three “I”s of Research, and more
Read Roychoudhury’s interview here.
Featured ACM Member: Heloisa Candello
Heloisa Caroline de Souza Pereira Candello is a Research Scientist at the Responsible & Inclusive group at the IBM Research Laboratory in São Paulo, Brazil. She applies her expertise in user research and user experience design to create engaging and ethical AI interactive systems, especially conversational interfaces. One of her primary interests has been in applying design methods to uncover how people use multimedia features in their mobile devices in cultural heritage settings.
She has published multiple papers in prestigious conferences and journals, and received an honorable mention award at CHI 2019. She is also an active volunteer and contributor to the ACM SIGCHI community, where she served as a member of the Volunteer Development Committee for two years and now is a co-chair of the SIGCHI LATAM Committee.
Candello is also an ACM Distinguished Speaker. Her Distinguished Speaker talks include “Artificial Intelligence and Social Impact,” “Generative AI: Design and HCI Perspectives,” and “User Methods and Approaches to Design Conversational User Interfaces.”