In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts ACM Fellow Margo Seltzer, co-recipient of the 2020 ACM Software System Award (shared with Mike Olson of Cloudera and Keith Bostic of MongoDB). She is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, Seltzer was the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Director at the Center for Research on Computation and Society. She is especially renowned for her work on log-structured file systems, databases, and wide-scale caching. Seltzer was previously CTO of Sleepycat Software, developers of the BerkeleyDB embedded database, later acquired by Oracle Corporation. Among her many honors, she is the recipient of the 2020 SIGMOD Systems Award and was recently named one of the “Top 20 Canadian Women in Cyber Security” by IT World Canada.
In the wide-ranging interview, Margo discusses her early years growing up in a high-achieving family and later studying applied mathematics at Harvard (before they had a CS major). She also recalls the amazing time in grad school studying under four legendary professors (including her advisor, Michael Stonebraker), and the origins of BerkeleyDB, which started as a graduate student open-source project and later became Sleepycat Software. Margo emphasizes the importance of taking risks and getting out of your comfort zone (and comfort research area) and inter-disciplinary collaboration, something she encourages in mentoring her students and junior colleagues. She also stresses the responsibility that comes with success and the value of mentoring students and providing guidance for impactful roles in service as well as research.
Francesca Rossi - Episode 53
Partha Talukdar - Episode 52
Rosalind Picard - Episode 51
Edward Y. Chang - Episode 50
Jacki O'Neill - Episode 49
Ranveer Chandra - Episode 48
Yael Tauman Kalai - Episode 47
Noriko Arai - Episode 46
Eugenio Zuccarelli - Episode 45
Regina Barzilay - Episode 44
Kush Varshney - Episode 43
Anima Anandkumar - Episode 42
Mor Peleg - Episode 41
Robert Metcalfe - Episode 40
H.-S. Philip Wong - Episode 39
Pattie Maes - Episode 38
Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman- Episode 37
Holly Urban - Episode 36
Pat Pataranutaporn - Episode 35
Team V Bionic - Episode 34
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