In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts software development productivity expert Nicole Forsgren, Senior Director of Developer Intelligence at Google. Forsgren co-founded DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), a Google Cloud team that utilizes opinion polling to improve software delivery and operations performance. Forsgren also serves on the ACM Queue Editorial Board. Previously, she led productivity efforts at Microsoft and GitHub, and was a tenure track professor at Utah State University and Pepperdine University. Forsgren co-authored the award-winning book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps and the recently published Frictionless: 7 Steps to Remove Barriers, Unlock Value, and Outpace Your Competition in the AI Era.

In this interview, Forsgren shares her journey from psychology and family science to computer science and how she became interested in evidence-based arguments for software delivery methods. She discusses her role at Google utilizing emerging and agentic workflows to improve internal systems for developers. She reflects on her academic background, as the idea for DORA emerged from her PhD program, and her time at IBM. Forsgren also shares the relevance of the DORA metrics in a rapidly changing industry, and how she's adjusting her framework to adapt to new AI tools. 

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award 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. Barto is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His honors include the UMass Neurosciences Lifetime Achievement Award, the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence, and the IEEE Neural Network Society Pioneer Award. He is a Fellow of IEEE and AAAS. Sutton is a Professor in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, a Research Scientist at Keen Technologies (an artificial general intelligence company) and Chief Scientific Advisor of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). In the past he was a Distinguished Research Scientist at Deep Mind and served as a Principal Technical Staff Member in the AI Department at the AT&T Shannon Laboratory. His honors include the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association, and an Outstanding Achievement in Research Award from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Sutton is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, AAAI, and the Royal Society of Canada.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) 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 decentralization technology. Dawn is the recipient of numerous awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award, and more than 10 Test-of-Time awards and Best Paper awards from top conferences in Computer Security and Deep Learning. She has been recognized as Most Influential Scholar (AMiner Award) for being the most cited scholar in computer security. Dawn is an IEEE Fellow and an Elected Member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also a serial entrepreneur and has been named on the Female Founder 100 List by Inc. and Wired25 List of Innovators.

AgentX-AgentBeats Agentic AI Competition

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts Russ Cox, Distinguished Engineer at Google. Previously, he was the Go language technical lead at Google, where he led the development of Go for more than a decade, with a particular focus on improving the security and reliability of using software dependencies. With Jeff Dean, he created Google Code Search, which let developers grep the world's public source code. He also worked for many years on the Plan 9 operating system from Bell Labs and holds degrees from Harvard and MIT. Russ is a member of the ACM Queue Editorial Board.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Anusha Nerella, a Senior Software Engineer at State Street. She has more than 13 years of experience working on building scalable systems using AI/ML in the domain of high-frequency trading systems and is passionate about driving adoption of automation in the FinTech industry. Anusha is a member of the ACM Practitioner Board, the Forbes Technology Council, and is an IEEE Senior Member and Chair of IEEE Women in Engineering Philadelphia chapter. She has served as a judge in hackathons and devotes significant time mentoring students and professionals on the use of AI technologies, building enterprise-grade software, and all things FinTech.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts 2024 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award recipient Ilias Diakonikolas, Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he researches the algorithmic foundations of machine learning and statistics. Ilias received the prestigious award for developing the first efficient algorithms for high-dimensional statistical tasks that are also robust, meaning they perform well even when the data significantly deviates from ideal modelling assumptions. His other honors and recognitions include a Sloan Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the best paper award at NeurIPS 2019, and the IBM Research Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award. He authored a textbook titled Algorithmic High-Dimensional Robust Statistics.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts ACM Distinguished Member Cecilia Aragon, Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering and Director of the Human-Centered Data Science Lab at the University of Washington (UW). She is the co-inventor (with Raimund Seidel) of the treap data structure, a binary search tree in which each node has both a key and a priority. She is also known for her work in data-intensive science and visual analytics of very large data sets, for which she received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2008. Prior to her appointment at UW, she was a computer scientist and data scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and NASA Ames Research Center, and before that, an airshow and test pilot, entrepreneur, and member of the United States Aerobatic Team. She is a co-founder of Latinas in Computing.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts 2024 ACM Prize in Computing recipient Torsten Hoefler, a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), where he serves as Director of the Scalable Parallel Computing Laboratory. He is also the Chief Architect for AI and Machine Learning at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). His honors include the Max Planck-Humboldt Medal, an award for outstanding mid-career scientists; the IEEE CS Sidney Fernbach Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions in the application of high-performance computers; and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, which recognizes outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences (Academia Europaea), a Fellow of IEEE, and a Fellow of ACM.

In the interview, Torsten reminisces on early interest with multiple computers to solve problems faster and on building large cluster systems in graduate school that were later turned into supercomputers. He also delves into high-performance computing (HPC) and its central role in simulation and modeling across all modern sciences. Bruke and Torsten cover the various requirements that power HPC, the intersection of HPC and recent innovations in AI, and his key contributions in popularizing 3D parallelism for training AI models. Torsten highlights challenges, such as AI’s propensity to cheat, as well as the promise of turning reasoning models into scientific collaborators. He also offers advice to young researchers on balancing academic learning with industry exposure.

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In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts 2024 ACM Athena Lecturer and ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award recipient Maja Matarić, the Chan Soon-Shiong Chaired and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics at the University of Southern California (USC), and a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind. Maja is a roboticist and AI researcher known for her work in human-robot interaction for socially assistive robotics, a field she pioneered. She is the founding director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center and co-director of the USC Robotics Research Lab. Maja is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AMACAD), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), IEEE, AAAI, and ACM. She received the US Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) from President Obama in 2011. She also received the Okawa Foundation, NSF Career, the MIT TR35 Innovation, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career, and the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Innovation Awards, among others, and is an ACM Distinguished Lecturer. She is featured in the documentary movie Me & Isaac Newton.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts ACM Fellow and 2016 ACM Software System Award recipient Alfred Spector, Professor of Practice in the MIT EECS Department. He was previously CTO of Two Sigma Investments, and before that Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google. Alfred played a key role in developing the Andrew File System (AFS), a breakthrough in distributed computing that later became a commercial venture. He is also known for coining the term “CS + X.” He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hertz Foundation, and National Academy of Engineering, and recipient of the IEEE Kanai Award for Distributed Computing.