ACM ByteCast

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM Books Partha Roop, Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer and Software Engineering at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), where he Precision Timed Systems research group. Partha's research interests are in safety of AI, ethical AI, and AI applications in cyber-physical systems in digital health, autonomous systems, and ML for real-time systems. His work has both academic and industrial uptake, including recent work on Logical Synchrony Networks with Google. He also co-founded the cloud services company APIMatic, a global leader on automatic SDK generation from APIs. Partha’s work on digital twins of human organs has influenced the work of major partners on this topic, including Mathworks.

Partha discusses his accidental entry into CS and how he became interested in formal methods and safety-critical systems. He also talks about the development of reactive processors for predictable timing in safety-critical applications (such as medical devices and adaptive cruise control), and the principles of synchronous programming languages that enable correct-by-construction designs. He shares his entrepreneurial experiences, including the successful APIMatic venture for automated SDK generation. Partha also describes applying engineering methods to developing digital models of human organs to test medical devices such as pacemakers, and his current research on logical synchrony for large-scale distributed systems in collaboration with Google and an autonomous vehicle company. Throughout, he emphasizes mentorship, interdisciplinary collaboration, the need for formal methods in AI safety, and the importance of treating students as future peers while fostering foundational skills in an AI-driven educational landscape.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, host Juan Miguel de Joya is joined by 2026-2027 ACM Athena Lecturer Monika Henzinger, Professor and Vice-President of Technology Transfer at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). Her career spans some of the most important developments in modern computer science, from foundational work on dynamic graph algorithms to the early days of web search at AltaVista and Google. She was the first Director of Research at Google, where she contributed to the development of large-scale web search technologies, and a member of Research Staff at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center. An ACM and EATCS Fellow, she is also a member of the Academia Europaea, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her honors include two ERC Advanced Grants, the Carus Medal of the Leopoldina, the Wittgenstein Award of the Austrian Science Fund, the European Young Investigator Award, and the NSF Career Award. She was recognized with the Athena Lecturer award for outstanding contributions to the fields of dynamic graph algorithms and web algorithms, and for dedicated mentoring and service to these communities.

Monika discusses her CS journey, from her teenage fascination with astronomy to discovering programming and eventually specializing in algorithmic research. She introduces dynamic algorithms, which efficiently update solutions as systems change., with some real world examples. Monika also shares her work in web information retrieval and privacy, and stories from the early days of search engines like AltaVista and Google, which prompted research into scalable indexing and better-ranked results. She also connects her industry experience to developments in modern AI, and the importance of balancing ML with the reliability of traditional algorithms when predictions fail. Juan and Monika also touch on differential privacy and the need for governments to establish privacy and security standards, and the exciting promise of LLMs to improve algorithms.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Charles H. Bennett, IBM Fellow at IBM Research and Gilles Brassard, Professor of Computer Science at Université de Montréal. Both are widely recognized as founders of quantum information science. Bennett is an American physicist whose research has shaped the foundations of quantum information science, quantum cryptography, and quantum teleportation, and who has played a central role in establishing quantum information science as a rigorous scientific discipline. Brassard is a Canadian computer scientist widely recognized as the first in the world to have delved into the uncharted territory of quantum information science. Their honors include the Wolf Prize in Physics, the Micius Quantum Prize, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. They are both members of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, and Brassard is an Officer of the Order of Canada and of the Ordre national du Québec.

In the interview, Charles and Gilles recount their chance meeting in Puerto Rico in 1979, which led to a remarkable and fruitful multidisciplinary collaboration. They highlight the role of serendipity in their own scientific discoveries and discuss how their once theoretical ideas became physical technologies, such as the first quantum-cryptography prototype, long-distance fiber experiments, satellite-based quantum key distribution, and rapid advances in quantum computing. They distinguish quantum cryptography from post-quantum cryptography and delve into the near-future implications of powerful quantum computers on information security.

In this episode, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast, Sabrina Hsueh and Li Zhou host Haider Warraich, a Program Manager at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and a practicing cardiologist at Boston Medical Center. At ARPA-H he leads the ADVOCATE program that supports the development, regulation, evaluation and deployment of Clinical Agentic AI to revolutionize care delivery for patients with chronic disease. Previously, he served at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a Senior Clinical Advisor for Chronic Disease to the FDA Commissioner, where he helped shape policy around drugs, devices, nutrition, digital health, and AI. Before that, Warraich was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Director of the Heart Failure Program, at the Veterans Affairs Health System in Boston. He is the author of more than 180 peer reviewed papers and several books. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian and The Atlantic.

The episode explores how agentic AI can address critical gaps in chronic disease management, focusing on heart failure and cardiovascular health. Dr. Warraich shares insights from his transition through clinical practice, academic research, the FDA, and his current role at ARPA-H, notably the newly launched ADVOCATE program, an ARPA-H initiative designed to build, evaluate, and deploy FDA-ready, patient-facing agentic AI technologies to serve as clinician extenders. The discussion covers geographic access gaps in care, autonomous agents and “copilots,” the current state of AI evaluation, and extending the ADVOCATE program from heart failure to all chronic disease management.

In this episode, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast, Sabrina Hsueh hosts engineer and entrepreneur Lucy Guo, co-founder of the infrastructure and software company Scale.AI and founder of Passes, a creator monetization and social media platform. Scale.AI, the data-labeling platform that industrialized human-in-the-loop infrastructure for generative AI and robotics, was acquired by Meta in 2025, making Guo the youngest self-made female billionaire at that time. In the past, she also helped develop Snap Maps as a product designer at Snap and founded Backend Capital, a venture capital firm that primarily funded early-stage engineering startups.

Lucy describes her evolution from a childhood hacker into a technology entrepreneur. She stresses a persistent “builder-first,” nimble mindset, the power of surrounding yourself with ambitious peers, solving problems you personally face, and the enduring importance of high-quality data evaluation (especially in high-stakes fields like medicine and clinical trials). She talks about the challenge of pivoting from enterprise data infrastructure to consumer tech, the rising role of female founders and investors enabled by micro-funds; how AI tools are democratizing product-building and design; and her investment focus. Lucy also shares advice for college students and other young builders looking to create a positive and lasting impact.