Khari Douglas will be covering the 8th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) on the CCC blog all week. Stay tuned and check out the HLF blog for more coverage of the event.  On the opening day of the 8th Heidelberg Laureate Forum, Scott Aaronson, winner of the 2020 ACM Prize in Computing, discussed the recent advancements in quantum computing and the impact that “quantum supremacy” could have on the future of computing. Aaronson described quantum mechanics as the operating system of the universe, through which everything in nature runs as an application program. As Aaronson explained, the state of any isolated physical system can be shown as a unit vector of complex numbers […]

A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. This episode of the podcast is taken from a video interview with Peter Mirski, the chair in Management and IT at the Management Center Innsbruck or MCI. This interview was recorded as part of traversing separation with the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation, a non-profit which was established in 2013 to foster mathematics and computer science. The foundation organizes the annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), a networking conference where 200 outstanding young researchers in mathematics and computer science interact with the recipients of the most renowned prizes in the fields. In this episode, Peter Mirski discusses digital learning […]

On day two of the Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) 2020, Robert Endre Tarjan and Donald Ervin Knuth engaged in a freewheeling conversation about mathematics, computer science, and art. Donald Knuth was the 1974 ACM A.M. Turing Award winner for “for his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the ‘art of computer programming’ through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.” Robert Tarjan won the Nevanlinna Prize in 1982 “for devising near-optimal algorithms for many graph-theoretic and geometric problems for the development and exploitation of data structures supporting efficient algorithms, and for contributing several algorithmic analyses of striking profundity […]

How can computing technology impact global health, particularly with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic? Shwetak Patel, 2018 ACM Prize in Computing winner and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member, addressed this question on the second day of the Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) 2020. Patel, an entrepreneur and professor of computer science at the University of Washington, won the 2018 Prize for “contributions to creative and practical sensing systems for sustainability and health.” During his presentation, Patel highlighted a few of the use cases of computing technology on healthcare: for instance, AI has improved screening and diagnostic capabilities by reading X-rays and radiology scans and the ubiquity of mobile phones makes them a great […]

As part of the first day of the Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) David A. Patterson, who won the 2017 ACM A.M Turing Award “for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry,” shared a presentation titled Architecture Innovation Accelerates Artificial Intelligence.  To begin, Patterson gave a brief overview of the history of AI: it started with top-down approaches where a programmer would attempt to describe all the rules with the proper logic for the machine, but other researchers argued that was impossible and instead advocated for a bottom up approach where you feed the machine data and it learns for itself, i.e. machine […]

Khari Douglas will be covering the Virtual HLF 2020 on the CCC blog all week. Stay tuned for more and watch the program via livestream here.  The Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) 2020 kicked off today (September 21st) via livestream. As part of the day’s program, Sir C. Antony R. Hoare and Leslie Lamport, both winners of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, sat down for a conversation to discuss their careers and offer advice to the young researchers in the audience. Lamport began the session by asking Hoare how his early school days prepared him to be a computer scientist. Hoare revealed he was nicknamed “Prof” by his classmates because of his studiousness and cited Bertrand Russell, […]