As we blogged in this space last month, Judea Pearl — winner of the 2011 ACM A. M. Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning” — delivered his Turing Award Lecture as the opening invited address at the 26th AAAI Conference in Toronto, Canada, in late July. ACM today posted video of the lecture on its website. Watch it here. And read a summary of Pearl’s lecture, as previously contributed to this blog by Vanderbilt computer science and computer engineering associate professor Douglas Fisher, after the jump.

Last month, we noted that eminent computer scientist Bill Wulf had taken the unprecedented step of resigning from the University of Virginia to protest the ousting of UVa president Teresa Sullivan by the university’s Board of Visitors. The Board reinstated Sullivan as president a week later, and since then, many in our community have wondered if Bill would rejoin the UVa faculty. Bill has maintained his stance despite pleas from his colleagues — faculty and administration alike — including Sullivan herself. Yesterday, he publicly released a letter explaining his rationale for not “un-resigning.” Here it is, in its entirety:

Earlier this month, another huge crowd of roboticists, artists, and filmakers converged on Manhattan for the second annual Robot Film Festival, a daylong celebration of robots on film. Founded by Heather Knight of Marilyn Monrobot and Carnegie Mellon University and co-organized by Marek Michalowski of Beatbots, the festival’s goal is “to highlight innovation, explore frontiers before technically feasible and investigate the impact of humanity and machinery interrelations.” The festival — themed “Are Robots Man’s Best Friend?” this year — kicked off with a screening of Sundance Film Festival winner Robot and Frank, due to hit U.S. theaters in August. Check out selected winners of the 2012 “Botskers” after the jump…

Eminent computer scientist Bill Wulf, who has been a leader by example for so many years in so many ways, has resigned from the University of Virginia to protest the recent conduct of the UVa Board of Visitors in removing President Teresa Sullivan. Wulf’s letter to newly-appointed Interim President Carl P. Zeithaml, reported in the Washington Post, states: “By this email I am submitting my resignation, effective immediately  …  A BOV that so poorly understands UVa, and academic culture more generally, is going to make a lot more dumb decisions  …  frankly, I think you should be ashamed to be party to this debacle! “I urge my fellow faculty to […]

The computing research community lost a wonderful researcher, colleague, and friend last week. David L. Waltz, whose extraordinary contributions and service to the field included a term as member of the CCC Council during the founding years, passed away on Thursday. The New York Times‘s John Markoff has written an excellent tribute: David L. Waltz, a computer scientist whose early research in information retrieval provided the foundation for today’s Internet search engines, died on Thursday in Princeton, N.J. He was 68.   The cause was brain cancer, his wife, Bonnie Waltz, said. He died at the University Medical Center at Princeton.   During his career as a teacher and a technologist at […]

On November 15, seven University of Washington faculty members from Biology, Bioengineering, and Computer Science & Engineering were privileged to share a 2-hour breakfast in Seattle with DARPA Director Regina Dugan, Deputy Director Ken Gabriel, IIO Office Director Dan Kaufman, IIO Program Manager Ben Cutler, and U.S. Marines Operational Liaison Col. Robert Durkin. One message that came through loud and clear:  DARPA leadership is intently focused on understanding how well DARPA is working in the eyes of the academic research community.  There were many probing questions exploring the details of interactions and relationships. Talk to your DARPA Program Manager was emphasized repeatedly.  For example, in order to allow headquarters staff […]