Haider Warraich - Episode 90

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 Cinical 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.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, host Juan Miguel de Joya welcomes 2025 ACM Luiz André Barroso Award recipient Ricardo Baeza-Yates, the Search Chief Scientist at You.com, holding part-time professor appointments at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain), and Universidad de Chile. The award recognizes his pioneering contributions to algorithms and information retrieval as well as his leadership in fostering a vibrant transnational research community across Latin America. Baeza-Yates is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost researchers in information retrieval, celebrated especially for pioneering innovative data structures that have shaped the field. His work has produced influential algorithms for string searching and fuzzy matching, including the well-known Shift-Or algorithm. As a practitioner, Baeza-Yates served as VP of Research for Yahoo Labs, secured 14 patents, and co-founded several startups in Chile and Spain, including Theodora AI, devoted to mitigating technological bias. Among his honors, he received the CLEI Distinction for Contributions to Computing in Latin America in 2009, the Spanish “Ángela Ruiz Robles” Award for research excellence and entrepreneurship in applied computing in 2018, the 2024 Chilean National Prize for Applied Sciences and Technology, and the first Merit Award from the Chilean Computing Science Society in 2025. Ricardo is a member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of ACM and IEEE. He is the co-author of Modern Information Retrieval, which became the field's most cited textbook. Ricardo shares his unconventional path into computing, from influential teachers to his discovery of the mathematical and logical beauty of algorithms. He discusses his current research, which focuses on evaluating AI by examining failures, harm, and risk rather than simply measuring success, since errors can have profound consequences in fields like medicine and law, where users may not have the expertise to recognize errors. He advocates for combining reliable search with AI to provide AI agents with accurate, trustworthy information. The conversation also explores the limitations and social consequences of increasingly replacing traditional search with AI-generated responses, including the risk of "cognitive offloading." Ricardo also shares his views on how AI is shifting computer science, offers advice for future AI developers, highlighting ACM’s principles for responsible computing, and advocates for more inclusion of Latin American perspectives in computing and AI.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes ACM Queue Editorial Board member Kelly Shortridge, Chief Product Officer at Fastly, where she previously served as VP of Security Products. Shortridge is the author of Security Chaos Engineering: Sustaining Resilience in Software and Systems (O'Reilly). An accomplished product executive, software innovator, and internationally recognized technical expert on resilience in complex systems, she is known for the application of behavioral economics, resilience, and DevOps principles to cybersecurity, and modernizing security programs. In the Kelly explains that security chaos engineering is really about resilience engineering—building systems that can recover quickly from inevitable failures. She makes an argument that organizations should prioritize adaptability, redundancy, and recovery over prevention, and encourages greater collaboration between security and platform engineering teams. The wide-ranging conversation covers “metrics theater,” the cost-resilience tradeoff, why software has unique advantages for simulation that we're not leveraging, and where LLMs fit (and don't fit) in security workflows.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2025 ACM Fellow Cynthia Rudin, the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Statistical Science, Mathematics, and Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Duke University, where she leads the Interpretable Machine Learning Lab. Her lab, which seeks to design predictive ML models that people can understand, focuses on areas including healthcare, criminal justice, and energy reliability. Among her honors, she has received the Squirrel Award for Artificial Intelligence from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), as well as the IJCAI John McCarthy Award. Rudin was recently named an ACM Fellow for contributions to and leadership in interpretable machine learning and societal applications. In the interview, Cynthia clarifies the crucial distinction between "interpretable" and “explainable" AI and makes the argument that true interpretability is foundational to trustworthy, ethical AI. She shares her extensive field experience collaborating with Con Edison engineers on power grid maintenance, neurologists on medical diagnostics, and the Cambridge Police Department on crime series detection, countering the widespread industry myth that AI performance must be sacrificed for transparency. She describes an innovative paradigm her lab developed to solve the "interaction bottleneck" between data scientists and domain experts, leveraging "Rashomon sets" to generate millions of equally accurate models simultaneously, using human-computer interaction (HCI) tools to create visual, encyclopedia-like interfaces.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes ACM Fellow Eric Allman, a foundational figure of the early Internet as the developer of Sendmail and its precursor Delivermail (for the original ARPANET) in the late 1970s at UC Berkeley. Sendmail is the mail transfer agent that powered a large portion of global email infrastructure through the formative years of the network and helped shape how messages move across the web. Allman is also an ACM Distinguished Engineer and was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014. The conversation explores the origins of Internet email, the messy realities of building software that must operate at planetary scale, and what lessons today’s engineers can learn from the systems and design decisions that quietly underpin modern computing. Eric shares his work at UC Berkeley spanning a variety of domains, from user interfaces to neural networks. He and Scott touch on current AI capabilities, including their personal experiments in assistive coding with current models such as Claude, and discuss into the programming languages Python, C#, TypeScript, and JavaScript. Eric also shares candid thoughts on letting go of computing after retirement.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2024 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award recipient Peter Stone, Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and Chief Scientist at Sony AI. He received the award for significant contributions to the theory and practice of AI, especially in reinforcement learning (RL), multiagent systems, transfer learning, and intelligent robotics. As a leading figure in AI research, Stone has fundamentally advanced how autonomous agents learn, plan, and collaborate. His groundbreaking work on RL algorithms has enabled robots to acquire skills through experience. He is an ACM, AAAI, AAAS, and IEEE Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and a Fulbright Scholar. At UT Austin, he is the founder and director of the Learning Agents Research Group (LARG) within the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, as well as Founding Director of Texas Robotics. In the past, he also worked at AT&T Labs - Research and co-founded Cogitai, Inc. (acquired by Sony). Peter explores the intersection of professional research and personal passion, detailing how his lifelong love for soccer fueled his involvement in RoboCup, where he aims to develop humanoid robots capable of competing at a World Cup level by 2050. The conversation highlights his leadership as the Chief Scientist of Sony AI, focusing on landmark projects like GT Sophy, an AI that mastered the complexities of Gran Turismo, and the development of FHIBE, an ethically sourced dataset designed to mitigate bias in machine learning. Throughout the interview, Stone emphasizes the importance of ad hoc teamwork—the ability of autonomous agents to collaborate on the fly with unfamiliar partners. He also shares his passion for undergraduate research and advocacy for AI education at all levels.

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 Monica Bertagnolli, a surgical oncologist, physician-scientist, and President Elect of the National Academy of Medicine—the first woman to hold that position in NAM’s history. She previously served as the 17th Director of the National Institutes of Health and the 16th Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), as well as President of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. In the past, she was the Richard E. Wilson Professor of Surgery in surgical oncology at Harvard Medical School, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a member of the Gastrointestinal Cancer Treatment and Sarcoma Centers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In the interview, Dr. Bertagnolli shares her unique journey from Princeton engineering to cancer surgery and national leadership. She emphasizes collaboration, system thinking, and bringing an engineering mindset of “pilot, test, scale, and continuously improve” to AI in healthcare. She highlights her role in founding mCODE, an initiative to improve patient care through oncological data interoperability, and how NAM's six core commitments and ten guiding principles for responsible AI address issues of bias and equity. Dr. Bertagnolli also offers insights on the growing erosion of trust in science and medicine—and how to restore it.

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 AI safety and ethics expert Ray Eitel-Porter, Luminary and Senior Advisor for AI at Accenture and an Intellectual Forum Senior Research Associate at Jesus College, the University of Cambridge. Previously, he served as Accenture's Global Responsible AI Lead. Ray is the author of Governing the Machine and sits on several boards and councils advising on data analytics and strategy. In the interview, Ray shares how he was inspired to research responsible AI by data privacy concerns and how biased datasets harm models. He describes his objective as helping people understand the potential risks of emerging technologies in order to confidently use them. He discusses case studies from his book where companies successfully implement responsible AI practices in the workplace, and shares how his framework will be useful even as technologies continue to emerge and change. Finally, Ray offers some advice for younger professionals in AI and medicine.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts software development productivity expert Nicole Forsgren, Senior Director of Developer Intelligence at Google. Forsgren co-founded DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), a Google Cloud team that utilizes opinion polling to improve software delivery and operations performance. Forsgren also serves on the ACM Queue Editorial Board. Previously, she led productivity efforts at Microsoft and GitHub, and was a tenure track professor at Utah State University and Pepperdine University. Forsgren co-authored the award-winning book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps and the recently published Frictionless: 7 Steps to Remove Barriers, Unlock Value, and Outpace Your Competition in the AI Era. In this interview, Forsgren shares her journey from psychology and family science to computer science and how she became interested in evidence-based arguments for software delivery methods. She discusses her role at Google utilizing emerging and agentic workflows to improve internal systems for developers. She reflects on her academic background, as the idea for DORA emerged from her PhD program, and her time at IBM. Forsgren also shares the relevance of the DORA metrics in a rapidly changing industry, and how she's adjusting her framework to adapt to new AI tools.