Featured ACM Member: Fred Chong
Fred Chong is the Seymour Goodman Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He was also the Lead Principal Investigator for the Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computing (EPiQC) Expedition, a collaboration between five universities and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Chong has received an NSF Career Award, an Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, and 17 Best Paper Awards. He was named an ACM Fellow for contributions to quantum computer architecture, compilation and optimisation. He is also a recipient of the Quantrell Award, the oldest undergraduate teaching award in the United States, as well as the University of Chicago’s Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award.
In his interview, he discusses his work with the EPiQC project, quantum and HPC fields interaction, the environmental impact of quantum computing and more.
Featured ACM Member: Cynthia Rudin
Cynthia Rudin is a professor who leads the Interpretable Machine Learning Lab at Duke University. Her lab, which seeks to design predictive machine learning models that people can understand, focuses on areas including healthcare, criminal justice and energy reliability.
Among her honors, she has received the Squirrel Award for Artificial Intelligence from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), as well as the IJCAI John McCarthy Award. Rudin was recently named an ACM Fellow for contributions to and leadership in interpretable machine learning and societal applications.
In her interview, she discusses her Rashomon Set theory and paradigm, optimal risk scores, the impact of the PaCMAP algorithm for data visualization and more.
ACM TechTalk: Marlene Mhangami
View the recent ACM Techtalk,“A Practical Introduction to Agentic Coding,” presented by Microsoft Senior Developer Advocate Marlene Mhangami.
AI Agents have become increasingly good at generating code. Developers who know how to use agentic tools as they program can increase their productivity significantly. In this session, Mhangami shares how she gets the most out of agents in her development workflow using GitHub Copilot SDK and GitHub CLI. She walks through how she uses MCP (Model Context Protocol), Agent Skills and Instructions to create semi-autonomous agents that can complete multi-step tasks end-to-end.
This talk is a hands-on case study of agentic coding in action, showing the core mental model (planning + tool use + iteration), effective patterns with today’s SDKs, common pitfalls (like MCP setup gotchas) and how these techniques scale to production dev workflows.
ACM Techtalk Archive available here
ACM ByteCast: Ray Eitel-Porter
In this episode of ACM ByteCast—part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast – Sabrina Hsieh and Li Zhou host AI safety and ethics expert Ray Eitel-Porter, Luminary and Senior Advisor for AI at Accenture and an Intellectual Forum Senior Research Associate at Jesuit College, the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Governing the Machine and sits on several boards and councils advising on data analytics and strategy.
Here, Eitel-Porter shares how he was inspired to research responsible AI by data privacy concerns and how biased datasets harm models. He describes his objective as helping people understand the potential risks of emerging technologies in order to confidently use them, discusses case studies from his book where companies successfully implement responsible AI practices in the workplace, and shares how his framework will be useful even as technologies continue to emerge and change. Finally, he offers some advice for younger professionals in AI and medicine.