ACM - Association for Computing Machinery

How are innovations in data science impacting legal analysis? Find out in this week’s People of ACM profile as we interview Altigran Soares da Silva, a Professor at the Federal University of Amazonas, and Member of the ACM Global Engagement Board. Sores da Silva predicts that information retrieval for legal documents will be improved with specialized language models, knowledge graphs, and citation-aware retrieval systems. He also discusses the companies he founded, including Akwan, which allowed information on web pages to be searched and used reliably. Soares da Silva concludes by stressing that the most important question in the current technology landscape is not ‘Can AI system can produce an answer?,’ but ‘Can we understand, verify, and responsibly use than answer in the real world?’ Read the full article here: https://buff.ly/fPwK86J

Happy Birthday to Turing Laureate John E. Hopcroft! Hopcroft received the with Robert E. Tarjan in 1986 for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures.

His work on formal languages and the analysis of algorithms has made John Hopcroft one of the handful of pioneering computer scientists who put the discipline on a firm theoretical foundation. Neither of his parents were high school graduates, but they instilled in him a love of learning and worked hard to ensure that he had the chance to obtain more education than either of them had.

Watch Hopcroft explain how he was hired for his first academic job, at Princeton, without having published a single paper: https://buff.ly/DlagdwK

What type of founders get investment more easily?
Check out the full interview with Lucy Guo, the first female billionaire startup founder and investor, here or wherever you get your podcast: https://buff.ly/dIZ7aY8

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, a time to celebrate the skills and contributions people with disabilities bring to our workplaces, communities, and economy.

In this video, Blind accessibility advocate and technologist Chancey Fleet dives into a CACM article she co-authored, "AI and the Future of Accessibility."

As AI advances, so does interest in using it to dismantle inequalities and expand access. But Fleet warns that AI can also create new barriers and advocates for people with disabilities to be more meaingfully involved across every stage of AI development.

What are your thoughts on the future of accessibility? What key challenges must the computing community prioritize next?

Check out the full article here: https://buff.ly/2G8SqOa

Happy Birthday to Turing Laureate Martin Hellman! Martin Hellman received the in 2015 for inventing and promulgating both asymmetric public-key , including its application to digital signatures, and a practical cryptographic key-exchange method.

In this video, Martin Hellman discusses his Ph.D. thesis work, “Learning with Finite Memory.” He explains using a trick coin as an example: https://buff.ly/1IpiXq2

We all know that query processing is part of our daily lives, especially since online searching is so vital in today’s world. But what technical advances made query processing so rapid? In the latest People of ACM profile, Kian-Lee Tan, a Professor at the National University of Singapore, provides key insights. Tan, who has written several books on query processing and database systems, recounts his early career steps. He also discusses some of the transformative advances in the field, including the integration of database management into large-scale distributed systems. Tan touches on his contributions to blockchain technology, including a first-of-its-kind framework he introduced for analyzing private block chains. Finally, in looking ahead, he thinks it will be critical for the field to make query-processing systems truly adaptive and self-tuning using AI and machine learning. Read the full article here: https://buff.ly/OVGk1c1

Happy Birthday to Seymour Cray, “father of the supercomputer,” who was born in 1925.

In 1964, Cray designed the CDC 6600, widely regarded as the first successful supercomputer. It was the fastest computer in the world, capable of executing about 3 million instructions per second, roughly three times faster than the previous record holder. Cray achieved this through an innovative architecture that used multiple processing units working in parallel, along with densely packed circuitry and advanced cooling.

Cray's approach to high-performance computing helped establish the architectural ideas and design principles that continue to shape supercomputers today, which power scientific research, engineering, weather modeling, and other computationally demanding applications.