The flood of events celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing is now reaching its peak. When you can't attend in person, the Internet lets you join in virtually.
The ACM Turing Centenary Celebration took place in San Francisco on June 15-16. It brought together 33 winners of the ACM Turing Award and other influential members of the computing community in a two-day event was webcast and is now available to view as a set of videos.
The ACM Turing Centenary Celebration took place in San Francisco on June 15-16. It brought together 33 winners of the ACM Turing Award and other influential members of the computing community in a two-day event was webcast and is now available to view as a set of videos.
The first webcast opens with a short photo-documentary outlining Alan Turing's career, then after welcoming remarks from ACM CEO White and an introduction to the event from Vint Cerf, there's first panel discussion, Turing the Man. In this session we hear from three people who met Turing personally, including William Newman, the son of Turing's friend and mentor Max Newman.
This is the first of eight panel discussions. They all sound fascinating and those taking part include legendary pioneers from today's perspective together with those at the cutting edge of topics in computer science. Sessions included ones on machine intelligence (Edward A. Feigenbaum, Marvin Minsky, Judea Pearl and Raj Reddy); systems architecture (Fernando J. Corbato, E. Allen Emerson, Joseph Sifakis and Ken Thompson) ; computer architecture (Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Ivan Sutherland and Charles P. (Chuck) Thacker; programming languages (Frances E. Allen, Barbara Liskov and Niklaus Wirth); and algorithmic thinking (Leonard Adleman, Richard M. Karp, Donald E. Knuth Robert Tarjan and Leslie G. Valiant).
Talks that interspersed the panel sessions have also been videoed, including Alan Kay's with the intriguing title Extracting Energy from the Turing Tarpit! and Dana Scott's Lambda Calculus Then and Now.
The program for the event is available online together with some twelve hours of video.
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