O'Really?

The Alan Turing statue at Bletchley Park. Creative commons licensed picture via Michael Dales on Flickr

Next weekend, a bunch of very distinguished computer scientists will rock up at the magnificent Manchester Town Hall for the Turing Centenary Conference in order to analyse the development of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Alan Turing’s legacy [1].

There’s an impressive and stellar speaker line-up including:

• Rodney Brooks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Fred Brooks, University of North Carolina Turing Award winner
• Vint Cerf, Google, Turing Award winner
• Edmund M. Clarke, Carnegie Mellon University, Turing Award winner
• Jack Copeland, University of Canterbury
• George Ellis, University of Cape Town, Templeton Prize winner
• David Ferrucci, IBM TJ Watson Research Center Principal Investigator of the Watson/Jeopardy! project
• Tony Hoare, Microsoft Research, Turing Award winner
• Garry Kasparov, Kasparov Chess Foundation
• Samuel Klein, Trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation and a Director of the One Laptop per Child Foundation.
• Donald Knuth, Stanford University, Turing Award winner
• Yuri Matiyasevich, Institute of Mathematics, St. Petersburgh
• Hans Meinhardt, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology
• Roger Penrose, University of Oxford, Wolf Prize winner
• Michael O. Rabin, Harvard University, Turing Award winner
• Adi Shamir, Weizmann Institute of Science, Turing Award winner
• Leslie Valiant, Harvard University, Turing Award winner
• Manuela M. Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University
• Andrew Yao, Tsinghua University, Turing Award winner

Tickets are not cheap at £450 for four days, but you can sign up for free public lectures by Jack Copeland on Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age and Roger Penrose on the problem of modelling a mathematical mind. Alternatively, if you can lend some time, the conference organisers are looking for volunteers to help out in return for a free conference pass. Contact Vicki Chamberlin for details if you’re interested.

References

1. Chouard, T. (2012). Turing at 100: Legacy of a universal mind Nature, 482 (7386), 455-455 DOI: 10.1038/482455a see also nature.com/turing