ACM ByteCast: Ricardo Baeza-Yates
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, host Juan Miguel de Joya welcomes 2025 ACM Luiz André Barroso Award recipient Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Search Chief Scientist at You.com and part-time Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain) and Universidad de Chile.
The award recognised his pioneering contributions to algorithms and information retrieval as well as his leadership in fostering a vibrant transnational research community across Latin America.
Here, Baeza-Yates shares his unconventional path into computing, discusses his current research, advocates for combining reliable search with AI to provide AI agents with accurate, trustworthy information, shares his views on how AI is shifting computer science, offers advice for future AI developers, and much more.
ACM TechTalk: Sibasis Padhi
View the recent ACM Techtalk “Preventing Retry Storms in AI-Assisted Microservices” with Sibasis Padhi, a Staff Software Engineer at Walmart Global Tech with more than 18 years of experience building and optimising large-scale enterprise systems.
His expertise spans cloud-native financial platforms, microservices performance engineering, observability, distributed systems reliability, and agentic AI.
This talk challenges a common assumption in distributed systems; that more retries always improve reliability. Using real-world examples from cloud-native financial systems, Padhi explores why retry storms happen, how they spread and why traditional approaches often fail under pressure.
He discusses practical techniques such as retry budgets, backoff strategies, request deadlines, observability signals and feedback controls that help keep systems stable during failures. The session will also examine how AI-assisted operational systems can make better decisions when they are guided by clear boundaries and system-level feedback rather than simply reacting to local failures, and more
Featured ACM Member: Russ Cox
Russ Cox is a Distinguished Engineer at Google. He was a leading figure in the development of the Go programming language and environment working with co-creators Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, and served as technical lead for over a decade.
Before Go, he created Google Code Search, which provided regular-expression-based search over the world’s open-source code. He is on the editorial board for ACM Queue, a magazine for practicing software engineers.
In his interview, he discusses the development of Go, AI’s future impact on software development, his work on ACM Queue and more. Read Cox’s interview here.
Featured ACM Member: Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi
Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi is a Professor at Japan’s National Institute of Informatics and at the University of Tokyo.
His research spans discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science with a particular focus on graph theory, graph algorithms and their applications. He was named a 2025 ACM Fellow for contributions to graph theory, graph algorithms and their applications.
In his interview, he discusses using graph theory in computer programming projects, a new approach for representation learning, the Four Color Theorem and more.