Featured ACM Member: Yasmin Kafai
Yasmin Kafai is the Lori and Michael Milken President’s Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. A recognized leader in computer science education, she develops online tools, projects, and communities that foster coding, critical thinking, and creativity. This year she was selected (with Mitchel Resnick of MIT) as the co-recipient of ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award.
Kafai and Resnick developed and researched Scratch, the widely popular programming language and community now used by over 150 million young people worldwide. She also pioneered the use of electronic textiles in high school classrooms, which teach circuitry and coding in new ways while broadening participation in computing.
In her interview, she discusses the Scratch Foundation, e-textiles and computer science education, teaching young people to design their own generative language models and more
Featured ACM Member: Tim Cheng
Kwang-Ting (Tim) Cheng is the Vice-President for Research and Development and a Chair Professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). His research interests focus on electronic design automation and software-hardware co-design for computing chips and systems. He has extensive experience in fostering cross-disciplinary research collaborations and has also made significant contributions to computer vision and medical image analysis.
Cheng was recently recognized as an ACM Fellow for his contributions to design automation and software-hardware co-design of electronic circuits and computing systems. He is also a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences and a Fellow of the School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo.
In his interview, he discusses his current research, exciting trends in design automation for computer systems, achieving fast and accurate human detection and more.
ACM TechTalk: Angela Sara Cacciapuoti
View the recent ACM Techtalk “Toward a Quantum-Native Internet from Architecture to Protocol Organization,” by Angela Sara Cacciapuoti, Full Professor of Quantum Communications and Networks at the University of Naples Federico II (Italy) and a co-founder of the Quantum Internet Research Group.
Quantum entanglement is the key network resource of the Quantum Internet, challenging several design principles that underpin the classical Internet. This talk discusses emerging “quantum-native” tenets spanning architecture and protocol organization: control/data-plane separation tailored to entanglement orchestration, quantum-aware addressing and routing, and a protocol-organization approach that moves beyond rigid layering toward context-driven composition and in-band control. To keep the discussion grounded, the talk also touches on how these ideas can be explored at scale using an extensible co-simulation framework, Q2NS, which integrates quantum primitives with the established classical networking stack. ACM Techtalk Archive available here
ACM ByteCast: Eric Allman
In this episode of ACM ByteCast Scott Hanselman welcomes ACM Fellow Eric Allman, a foundational figure of the early Internet as the developer of Sendmail and its precursor Delivermail (for the original ARPANET) in the late 1970s at UC Berkeley. Sendmail is the mail transfer agent that powered a large portion of global email infrastructure through the formative years of the network and helped shape how messages move across the web. Allman is also an ACM Distinguished Engineer and was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014.
Here, Allman explores the origins of Internet email, the messy realities of building software that must operate at planetary scale, and what lessons today’s engineers can learn from the systems and design decisions that quietly underpin modern computing, shares his work at UC Berkeley spanning a variety of domains, and shares candid thoughts on letting go of computing after retirement.