In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes ACM Fellow Juan Gilbert, the Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and Chair of the Computer & Information Science & Engineering Department at the University of Florida where he leads the Computing for Social Good Lab. The lab’s innovations include open-source voting technology to help make elections more secure, accessible, and usable; making voting technologies more transparent; increasing fairness and reducing bias in ML algorithms used in admissions and hiring decisions; and reducing conflicts during traffic stops. Gilbert’s many honors and recognitions include the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, the CRA A. Nico Habermann Award, and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation (NMTI).

Juan shares with Scott his surprise at being nominated for the NMTI, which he received in 2023 from President Joe Biden for pioneering a universal voting system that makes voting more reliable and accessible for everyone and for increasing diversity in the computer science workforce. He talks about his lab’s mission to change the world by solving real-world problems, and principles such as “barrier-free design” that he and his collaborators applied to his lab’s voting machine technology. They also discuss how his Application Quest (AQ) technology uses AI to help make fairer hiring decisions, and how his students’ Virtual Traffic Stops app helps protect both drivers and law enforcement safe during traffic stops. Juan also explains how he and his lab choose which projects they work on and teases the promise of brain-computer interaction technology.