Leah Hoffmann

2 months ago | cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |Alex Tray |Doug Meil |Sam Greengard

In an age of breathless predictions and sky-high valuations, cognitive scientist Gary Marcus has emerged as one of the best-known skeptics of generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Nov 22, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |R. Colin Johnson |Mark Halper |Karen Emslie

2024 ACM Athena Award recipient and University of Southern California professor Maja Matarić is not afraid to get personal. In her quest to design socially assistive robots—robots that provide social, not physical, support in realms like rehabilitation, education, and therapy—she realized that personalizing interactions would boost both engagement and outcomes. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made that easier, though as always, surprises are never far when human beings are involved.

Oct 25, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |Sam Greengard |Herbert Bruderer

Amanda Randles on how modeling blood flows inside the human body can save, and improve, lives. Posted Oct 25 2024 What does your blood look like as it circulates through your body? The answer depends not just on the structure of your cells but the geometry of your vascular system.

Apr 10, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |Neil Savage |Saurabh Bagchi |Karen Emslie

Drawn to computer science at the suggestion of his parents—who thought the field might provide a more practical outlet for his love of mathematics—Avi Wigderson, the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient, has made lasting contributions to the theory of computational complexity. Wigderson’s voracious intellectual curiosity led him to explore topics ranging from cryptography and optimization to randomness, pseudorandomness, and circuit complexity.

Feb 29, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |Douglas Schuler |Orit Hazzan |Alex Vakulov

Cryptographer and 2022 ACM Prize winner Yael Tauman Kalai is keenly aware of the trade-offs that often must be made between security and computational efficiency. Kalai, who works as a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and as an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has developed groundbreaking methods for succinctly verifying the correctness of a computation. Here, she explains how they work.