Partha Roop - Episode 93

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM Books Partha Roop, Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer and Software Engineering at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), where he Precision Timed Systems research group. Partha's research interests are in safety of AI, ethical AI, and AI applications in cyber-physical systems in digital health, autonomous systems, and ML for real-time systems. His work has both academic and industrial uptake, including recent work on Logical Synchrony Networks with Google. He also co-founded the cloud services company APIMatic, a global leader on automatic SDK generation from APIs. Partha’s work on digital twins of human organs has influenced the work of major partners on this topic, including Mathworks. Partha discusses his accidental entry into CS and how he became interested in formal methods and safety-critical systems. He also talks about the development of reactive processors for predictable timing in safety-critical applications (such as medical devices and adaptive cruise control), and the principles of synchronous programming languages that enable correct-by-construction designs. He shares his entrepreneurial experiences, including the successful APIMatic venture for automated SDK generation. Partha also describes applying engineering methods to developing digital models of human organs to test medical devices such as pacemakers, and his current research on logical synchrony for large-scale distributed systems in collaboration with Google and an autonomous vehicle company. Throughout, he emphasizes mentorship, interdisciplinary collaboration, the need for formal methods in AI safety, and the importance of treating students as future peers while fostering foundational skills in an AI-driven educational landscape. Errata: In the episode, Partha credits Sanjit Seshia as the inventor of satisfiability modulo theories (SMT). While Seshia has made significant contributions to its scalability with the UCLID verification framework, the theoretical and algorithmic roots of SMT were pioneered in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Greg Nelson, Derek Oppen, Robert Shostak, Robert S. Boyer, and J Strother Moore.