Innovation Leaders

In this interview, Ubiquity's senior editor, Bushra Anjum, chats with Behnaz Arzani, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, about her pioneering work in automated network management. Arzani discusses the challenges of managing large-scale networks, particularly during incidents, and explores the role of AI and heuristics in addressing these challenges. The conversation then moves to her recently open-sourced project, MetaOpt, which helps network operators analyze and improve the impact of various network algorithms in use.

In this interview, Ubiquity's senior editor, Dr. Bushra Anjum, chats with Ming Yin, an assistant professor at Purdue University, about how intentional human interactions can fully realize the potential of AI in augmenting human intelligence. We also discuss Dr. Yin's research to empirically understand how humans engage with AI, computationally model this engagement, and design interventions to improve humans' engagement with AI by both influencing human behavior and adjusting AI designs.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Ken Holstein, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he leads the Co-Augmentation, Learning, & AI (CoALA) Lab. We discuss how, amidst all of the current AI hype, human ability and expertise remain underappreciated. Designing for complementarity in AI-augmented tooling ensures that domain-specific worker-facing AI systems are designed to bring out the best of human ability rather than simply attempting to, many a time incorrectly, automate them away.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Francis Enyi, a senior program analyst with the Information and Communication Technology Department at Delta State University Teaching Hospital in Nigeria. They discuss how Enyi and his team of computer software developers, medical personnel, and linguists are working toward bridging the deficit of healthcare personnel in remote and rural areas in Africa. The conversation also details the team's flagship service, interactive voice response (IVR) software, providing access to quality non-surgical medical care information to the populace, made available via the GSM telephone network.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Sunita Chandrasekaran, an associate professor with the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware. Chandrasekaran discusses her goal, as a researcher as well as an educator, to prepare the next-generation workforce to tackle rich hardware features while exploring suitable software solutions. The discussion also addresses sustainable, maintainable, and portable solutions for legacy code that is traditionally unsuited for modern architectures.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Daniel Russo, an associate professor at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, about the future of work for software developers. They discuss the longitudinal studies Dr. Russo and his team have performed to monitor software developers' productivity and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, the conversation focuses on what kind of hybrid work environment is a better fit for software developers based on the different institutional, work, and personal preferences.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Grace IbukunOluwa Ufeoshi, a data science professional and AI entrepreneur, about her passion for preparing the underprivileged African youth for the future of work in the IT ecosystem. They discuss IbukunOluwa's journey as a computer science educator and community leader, and her latest initiatives to equip young people with the requisite skills needed to apply AI in solving real social and business problems---especially in areas of socio-economic development across Africa.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Dr. Heena Rathore, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Texas State University, on how cyber-physical systems (CPS) are inherently similar to humans in their reliance upon sensing their environments and making decisions. They further discuss how this similarity motivates the exploration of novel AI algorithms inspired by the principles of cognition and neuroscience to ensure the security of critical CPS infrastructure, such as IoT networks, medical devices, and connected vehicles.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Dr. Shaimaa Lazem, an associate research professor at SRTA-City Egypt. They discuss how computer science curricula should aim at increasing students' sensibilities and appreciation of the differences in the worldviews, skills, and abilities of technology users; as well as teach students how to harness and embrace these differences in technology design.

In this interview, Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Dr. Tengyu Ma, an assistant professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Stanford University. They discuss Dr. Ma's research that aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice in deep learning by developing novel mathematical tools to understand complex and mysterious deep learning systems.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Kashyap Tumkur, a software engineer at Verily Life Sciences, the healthcare and life sciences arm of Alphabet. They discuss how the notion of "precision medicine" has gained popularity in recent times. Next, the focus turns to Tumkur's work, where he, along with his team, is working on collecting and integrating continuous time-series data to create a map of human health.

In this interview, Bushra Anjum, senior editor Ubiquity, sits down with Xiaokui Shu, a Research Staff Member at IBM, and they chat about the latest emerging issues in cybersecurity. Is it possible to discover modern cyber threats before attackers accomplish their goals? The discussion then turns to the new era of dynamic cyber defense, which consists of detection strategies and procedures developed on the fly by security analysts based on live observations.

In this interview, Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Felix Kerger, an experienced developer advocate working for King.com (Spain). They focus on the increasing challenges of information overload for computing professionals and students. The discussion then moves to some of the strategies that can be employed to make information easier to find and ensure the right audience receives the right information directly.

In this interview, Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Dr. Ella Peltonen, a research scientist with the Center for Ubiquitous Computing, University of Oulu, Finland, about the traditional divide between theoretical machine learning and the more applied fields of distributed systems. They then discuss the need for environments and opportunities where researchers from both theory and application areas can discuss, share their latest findings, and understand each other.

In this interview, Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Dr. Gürkan Solmaz, a senior researcher at NEC Laboratories Europe, Germany, about his work focused on building new situation classification frameworks for smart cities (IoT). They then discuss the three major design aspects for such systems, namely, certainty, efficiency, and privacy.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Dr. Tempestt Neal to discuss her work to improve access control on mobile devices, specifically developing continuous authentication methods.

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum sits with Akhil Mathur, a principal research scientist at Nokia Bell Labs in Cambridge (United Kingdom). Both discuss improving the robustness of AI models deployed on mobile and wearable devices to minimize the accuracy degradation as these devices are used in new domains.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Dr. Jesmin Jahan Tithi, a research scientist in the Parallel Computing Labs at Intel, to discuss overcoming the scaling wall that is thwarting application efficiency, specifically within high-performance computing.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Dr. Richard Skarbez, a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at La Trobe University, to discuss augmented, mixed, or virtual realities and how users interact with such technologies.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Jeronimo Castrillon, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the TU Dresden, to discuss the need for novel programming abstractions and methodologies for efficient computing on future systems.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Sarah Clinch, computer science researcher and lecturer at the University of Manchester, to discuss the cognitive burden technology innovations create.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Lauren Wilcox, Director of the HX Lab at Georgia Tech, to discuss how intelligent technologies can be designed and developed to facilitate the management of personal health data and support patient decision-making.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Danish Contractor, a senior artificial intelligence researcher at IBM Research India. Contractor discusses his work advancing question-answering systems and chatbots for complex human interaction.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Marianna Obrist, who is exploring augmented and virtual reality within the context of HCI. Obrist discusses multi-sensory interactions that go beyond sight and sound, as well as her work that explores the role of human senses in the design of future technologies.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum, sits down with Dr. Santiago Montesdeoca to discuss the evolution of the animation industry as well as the aesthetic constraints creatives face when reconciling their personal artistry with commerce and trends.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum, sits down with Prof. Lana Yarosh of the University of Minnesota to discuss geophysical and emotional distances as they relate to social disconnection and our evergrowing dependence on technology.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum, sits down with Jason Ernst, CTO of RightMesh, to discuss how his company is using mobile mesh networks to decentralize existing network infrastructure in areas where it doesn't exist or is too expensive to maintain--effectively putting the control of data in the hands of the people.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum, sits down with Katie Schuman to discuss computers inspired by biological neural systems as an alternate promising architecture.

Indrajit Roy is a staff engineer at Google. He is currently working on peta-scale distributed databases. Previously, he was a principal researcher at HP Labs where he led the development of Distributed R, an open source HP product that brings the benefits of parallelism to data scientists. Roy received his Ph.D. in computer science from UT Austin. He is also an inaugural member of the ACM Future of Computing Academy.

Lauren Maffeo is a research analyst who joined the global technology sector in 2012. She started her career as a freelance journalist covering tech news for The Next Web and The Guardian. She has also worked with CEOs of pre-seed to profitable SaaS startups on media strategy. Lauren joined GetApp, a Gartner company, as a content editor in 2016. She covers the impact of emerging tech like AI on small and midsize business owners.

Lauren has been cited by sources including Forbes, Fox Business, DevOps Digest, The Atlantic, and Inc.com. In 2017, Lauren was named to The Drum's 50 Under 30 list of women worth watching in digital. She holds an M.Sc. from The London School of Economics and a certificate in Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy from MIT's Sloan School of Management.

Dr. Pamela Wisniewski is an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida's Department of Computer Science and an inaugural member of the ACM Future Computing Academy. As a human-computer interaction researcher, she studies privacy as a means to protect people, but more importantly, as a social mechanism to enrich online interactions that people share with others. She is particularly interested in the interplay between social media, privacy, and online safety for adolescents. Being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, she is committed to protecting at-risk youth from online sexual predation risks, as well as empowering vulnerable youth online, so that they can garner the resources and support they need to overcome adversity and succeed in life.

Dr. Bushra Anjum is a senior editor for ACM's web-based magazine Ubiquity. Her research background is in performance evaluation and queuing theory. She is also a trained data scientist, having worked extensively with predictive analytics. Anjum, a Fulbright Scholar, has previously held academic positions in the U.S. and Pakistan, and is a keen enthusiast of promoting diversity in the STEM fields. She is a mentor at Rewriting the Code, GlobalTechWomen, ReigningIt, Empowering Leadership Alliance, LeanIn.org, Computing Beyond the Double Bind's mentoring network, and others. Dr. Anjum can be contacted via Twitter @DrBushraAnjum.