Engaging talks by experts at ACM annual event

Association for Computing Machinery- India (ACM-India)’s annual event 2020 was hosted at IIT-Gn recently saw four engaging talks by eminent experts and ACM Turing Award winners. Prof

Yann LeCun

, a French-American computer scientist from the New York University, Chief AI Scientist at Facebook and 2018 ACM Turing Award Winner, who works primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience, delivered a talk on ‘Self-Supervised Learning: the Next Step in AI’.
Elaborating further Prof Yann LeCun said that 3D ConvNet can be used for medical image analysis, breast cancer detection, faster MRI, in Physics and in Astrophysics to predict the cosmological structure formation. He said that Supervised Deep Learning works well when you have data. He also gave examples of research experiments where Deep Learning can save lives, by deploying automated emergency braking systems, by detecting tumour in mammograms, and by filtering online content like hate speech, calls for violence, weapon sales etc.
Prof

Susanne Albers

, a German theoretical computer scientist from the Technische Universität München and a recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, talked about ‘Algorithms Beyond the Worst Case’. She explained various theories of worst-case analysis for algorithm performance, various aspects of online paging, and different analytical approaches and its applications in computer science.
Prof

Shwetak Patel

, an American computer scientist and entrepreneur from the University of Washington, with familial roots in Gujarat, and Winner of 2018 ACM Prize in Computing, best known for developing novel sensing solutions and global computing, spoke about ‘New Ways of Thinking of the Mobile Phone for Healthcare’. He described a collection of research projects conducted with his clinical collaborators that utilise different sensors on mobile devices (e.g. microphones, cameras, accelerometers, etc) in new ways to enable the screening, self-management and longitudinal study of various diseases.

In the end, Prof

M Balakrishnan

, a Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Delhi, Founding Vice-Chancellor at Satya Bharti Institute of Technology and ACM Eugene L Lawler Award Winner, gave a talk about ‘Assistive Technology Solutions for Mobility & Education of Visually Impaired’.