ACM ByteCast: Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2024 ACM A.M. Turing laureates, Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton.
They received the Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning, a computational framework that underpins modern AI systems such as AlphaGo and ChatGPT.
In the itnerview, Barto and Sutton reflect on their long collaboration together and the personal and intellectual paths that led both researchers into CS and reinforcement learning (RL), a field that was once largely neglected. They touch on interdisciplinary explorations across psychology (animal learning), control theory, operations research, cybernetics and how these inspired their computational models. They also explain some of their key contributions to RL, trace their early research to later systems such as TD-Gammon, Q-learning and AlphaGo, and much more.
ACM ByteCast: Dawn Song
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Scott Hanselman welcomes ACM Fellow Dawn Song, Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, Co-Director of Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (RDI) and Founder of Oasis Labs. Her research interest lies in AI safety and security, Agentic AI, deep learning, security and privacy and decentralisation .
Here, Dawn shares her academic journey in cybersecurity and how the MacArthur Fellowship (aka the “Genius Grant”) and other prestigious recognitions enabled her to pursue impactful multidisciplinary research. She covers a myriad of topics around Agentic AI, including current and future security vulnerabilities from AI-powered malicious attacks, Dawn’s popular MOOC at RDI, and the associated AgentX-AgentBeats global competition (with more than $1 million in prizes and resources) focused on standardised, reproducible agent evaluation benchmarks to advance the field as a public good.
Listen to ACM ByteCast interviews here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Featured ACM Member: Sole Pera
Maria Soledad Pera is an Associate Professor in the Web Information Systems group at the Delft University of Technology. Her primary research interests include information retrieval and recommender systems as well as information access and web search. An important focus of Pera’s work has been understanding how children search for and retrieve information online, as well as investigating how recommender systems can better serve young users by addressing the challenges and risks inherent to their interaction with algorithmic recommendations.
Pera was recently named (with George Neville-Neil) Co-Chair of the newly instituted ACM Globalization Board. The Board’s mission includes expanding ACM’s global footprint and supporting all computing professionals irrespective of their geographic location.
In her interview, she discusses information retrieval, child-aware search environments, her role as Co-Chair of the ACM Globalization Board, and more.
Featured ACM Member: Julia Gersey
Julia Gersey is a PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, advised by Pei Zhang. Her research lies at the intersection of embedded & mobile computing, sensor networks and applied machine learning. Recently she has been building mobile sensing systems for real-world deployments.
Among her honours, she received a US Department of Energy (DOE) Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. Gersey is the Editor in Chief of ACM XRDS, ACM’s magazine for students. XRDS articles, written by students as well as leaders in the field, vary from highlights of new and important research to interviews, roundtable discussions and introductory overviews.
In her interview, she discusses her interest in building mobile sensing systems, analysing changing city conditions to better serve communities, the benefits of XRDS for students and more.