Turing Award winner Manuel Blum to speak on campus

January 23, 2013

Turing Award winner Manuel Blum will be on campus Friday, Jan. 25. His lecture, "Towards the Design of an Automated Physicist: A Model (and Program) for Inferring the Physical Laws of a Simplified World," is part of the CIS-ECE-IMSE Distinguished Lecture Series.

Blum will speak at 11 a.m. in the BorgWarner Auditorium in the IAVS.

"It is a great honor for Professor Blum to visit us and share with us his experience in one of his favorite research areas," said Habib Ammari, associate professor of computer and information science.

Blum plans to discuss a complexity theory problem and his proposed solution.

"More precisely, he will model the process of inferring the laws of the physical world as a game between a Deterministic Turing Machine whose input/output represents the physics of a deterministic world and an inference algorithm representing an automated physicist that seeks to infer the laws of that world," Ammari said.

Blum is the Bruce Nelson Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received the Turing Award—the Association for Computing Machinery's most prestigious technical award—in 1995 for his "contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking."