[Edinburgh-pm] Fwd: 2009 Milner Lecture/1 June 2009, 4:00 pm

Robert Rothenberg robrwo at gmail.com
Sun May 10 07:36:21 PDT 2009


-----Original Message-----

This is a public lecture, open to all.

The 2009 Milner Lecture
http://www.lfcs.inf.ed.ac.uk/events/milner-lecture/

Moshe Y. Vardi
Rice University

AND LOGIC BEGAT COMPUTER SCIENCE:
    WHEN GIANTS ROAMED THE EARTH

Monday, 1 June 2009, 4:00 pm
Informatics Forum, Room G.07, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh
and afterwards for a Reception in the Informatics Forum


Abstract:
During the past fifty years there has been extensive, continuous, and
growing interaction between logic and computer science.  In fact, logic
has been called "the calculus of computer science".  The argument is
that logic plays a fundamental role in computer science, similar to that
played by calculus in the physical sciences and traditional engineering
disciplines.  Indeed, logic plays an important role in areas of computer
science as disparate as architecture (logic gates), software engineering
(specification and verification), programming languages (semantics,
logic programming), databases (relational algebra and SQL), artificial
intelligence (automated theorem proving), algorithms (complexity and
expressiveness), and theory of computation (general notions of
computability). This non-technical talk will provide an overview of the
unusual effectiveness of logic in computer science by surveying the
history of logic in computer science, going back all the way to
Aristotle and Euclid, and showing how logic actually gave rise to
computer science.

Biography:
Vardi is the recipient of three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, a
co-winner of the 2000 Goedel Prize, a co-winner of the 2005 ACM
Kanellakis Award for Theory and Practice, a co-winner of the 2006 LICS
Test-of-Time Award, a co-winner of the 2008 ACM PODS Mendelzon
Test-of-Time Award, a winner of the 2008 ACM SIGMOD Codd Innovations
Award, a recipient of the 2008 Blaise pascal Medal for Computer Science
by the European Academy of Sciences, as well as a 2008 ACM Presidential
Award. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Saarland,
Germany, and the University of Orleans, France. Vardi is an editor of
several international journals, and Editor-in-Chief of the Communication
of ACM. He is Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a Fellow of the Association
of Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence,
and the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He was
designated Highly Cited Researcher by the Institute for Scientific
Information, and was elected as a member of the US National Academy of
Engineering, the European Academy of Sciences, and the Academia Europea.
He recently co-chaired the ACM Task Force on Job Migration.


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