The Turing Award Winner Speaker Series

A new series of publicly available lectures at Georgia Tech

Zvi Galil has been a good friend for a long time and came to Georgia Tech as my Dean from 2010 until my retirement. He ended his term as Dean in 2019 but stayed active faculty. He currently holds the Frederick G. Storey Chair in Computing—does that sound familiar?

He has teamed with the programming and software systems pioneers Bjarne Stroustrup and Andi Gutmans to create the Georgia Tech Turing Award Winner Speaker Series.

This is a series of talks by Turing Award winners to be held at Georgia Tech, interspersed with their regular colloquium lectures. Of course, the Turing Award is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to individuals for their contributions of major importance to our field—see here.

The Talks

The talks are available remotely, free of charge, via an online RSVP. We might expect this from Zvi, who was hailed in a WSJ article as “the main who made online college work.” They already have over 1,000 RSVPs.

Here are the talks of five Turing Award recipients shown on the site:

Leslie Lamport will speak on “How to Write a 21st Century Proof.” The time is 12pm EST on January 24. He was honored for:

[F]undamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems, notably the invention of concepts such as causality and logical clocks, safety and liveness, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency.

Barbara Liskov will speak on “How Data Abstraction Changed Computing Forever.” The time is 1pm EST on February 7 (not 12pm). She was honored for:

[C]ontributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.

Jeffrey Ullman will speak on “Data Science: Is It Real?” The time is 12pm on February 21st. He was honored jointly with Alfred Aho:

For fundamental algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation and for synthesizing these results and those of others in their highly influential books, which educated generations of computer scientists.

Jack Dongarra will speak on “A Not so Simple Matter of Software.” The time is 12pm on March 13th. He was honored for

[H]is pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries that enabled high performance computational software to keep pace with exponential hardware improvements for over four decades.

Unique among these speakers, Dongarra has been honoured as well as honored—he is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Edward Feigenbaum will give a “Shorter AMA Style Interview” on March 20th. The time for this is 1:30pm, not 12pm. He was honored jointly with Raj Reddy:

For pioneering the design and construction of large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology.

Open Problems

All the talks should be wonderful and we hope you all can see some of them. Best.