Why We Need to See Inside AI’s Black Box

This article was originally written by me for The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It appeared there on May 26, 2023. For some people, the term “black box” brings to mind the recording devices in airplanes that are valuable for postmortem analyses if the unthinkable happens. For others it evokes small, minimally […]

The Caprice of Algorithms

When we design algorithms or implement them into computing systems, we rarely think about the policies that they instantiate. We rarely think beyond trite generalizations, of the countless users who may be at the receiving end of the vagaries of our algorithms. If our project becomes immensely successful, then we will count our users in […]

Is Computing Innovation Getting Harder?

The angst, or perhaps irritation, that we feel at times about the rate of innovation was captured pithily by Peter Thiel, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” I am going to confine my thoughts to the world I know best, innovations in the field of computing. Many of us, inside the ivory […]

To Fuse Wisely in Serverless DAGs: A Sigmetrics Winner

This post gives a high-level view of our Sigmetrics 2022 paper, which was recently announced at the conference as the best paper winner. Ashraf Mahgoub, Edgardo Barsallo Yi (Purdue University), Karthick Shankar (CMU), Eshaan Minocha (Purdue University), Sameh Elnikety (Microsoft Research), Saurabh Bagchi, and Somali Chaterji (Purdue University). WISEFUSE: Workload Characterization and DAG Transformation for […]

LiteReconfig at Eurosys 2022: Cost and Content-Aware Video Object Detection for Mobile GPUs

Object detection is arguably one of central problems in computer vision. Much progress has been made over the past few years in deep learning based object detectors. Despite their impressive accuracy results on standard benchmarks, these models come at a price of their complexity and computational cost. This imposes a major barrier to deploy these […]