Cynthia Rudin - Episode 86

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.