Archive: Tue Jul 2012

The Turing Centenary Conference was held this June at Cambridge University. Cambridge had special significance for Alan Turing, as he spent his formative undergraduate years there and returned there shortly after his PhD. The conference brought together…

Barbara Liskov is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She has spent the past forty or so years finding and describing new ways…

Ann Druyan, an American author and producer specializing in cosmology and popular science, once said For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness, and comet personally. We…

Can we build a functional brain using computers? In order to answer that question, we need to know how the brain is built in nature. The human brain is composed of more than 10 billion cells called neurons that can be electrically activated upon…

Cars that drive themselves. A program that trounces the best human players at Jeopardy! A machine that defeats the world champion at chess. It would seem that the quest to create human-level artificial intelligence (AI) is making astounding progress, and…

“Bruce, did you know that it was an openly gay Englishman who was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans’ Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do –…