The Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) recently announced the start of the application period to attend the 8th annual HLF, which will take place September 20–25, 2020 in Heidelberg, Germany. Organized by the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation and Klaus Tschira Stiftung, HLF brings together laureates in compute science and mathematics with young researchers in the fields in “a one-week event combining scientific, social and outreach activities. The recipients of the most prestigious awards in mathematics and computer science, the Abel Prize, ACM A.M. Turing Award, ACM Prize in Computing, Fields Medal and the Nevanlinna Prize are invited to participate in the Forum. They will give lectures on subjects of their choosing which […]

Vint Cerf, known as one of the “fathers of the internet” and a recipient of the 2004 ACM A.M. Turing Award, was a participating laureate at this year’s Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF). Cerf currently acts as a vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. At HLF, I had an opportunity to sit down with Vint and interview him for the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) official podcast, “Catalyzing Computing,” which features interviews with researchers and policymakers about their background and experiences in the computing community. Prior to our interview he also participated in a press conference where he discussed some of the projects he is currently involved with, as well as other […]

Shwetak Patel, the 2018 ACM Prize in Computing winner and Professor in Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, was a participating laureate at this year’s Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF). During his presentation at HLF, Dr. Patel discussed some of the innovate health applications he and his team have developed including an app that can monitor jaundice in babies called Bilicam. Typically, it can be hard to discern if a baby has severe jaundice since many babies skin has a yellowish hue naturally. Bilicam filters certain kinds of light out of the spectrum which allows that user to track the kinds of chemicals found in the babies skin. From there you can decide whether there […]

In Tuesday’s opening lecture at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), Joseph Sifakis, 2007 Turing Award winner, discussed whether we can trust autonomous systems and considered the interplay between the trustworthiness of the system – the system’s ability to behave as expected despite mishaps – and the criticality of the task – the severity of the impact an error will have on the fulfillment of a task. Sifakis defined autonomy as the combination of five complementary functions – perception, reflection, goal management, planning, and self-awareness/adaption. The better a given system can manage these functions the higher the level of autonomy we say that it has, from 0 (no automation) to 5 (full automation, no […]

Yesterday morning at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) laureates Yoshua Bengio (2018 Turing Award), Edvard Moser (2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine), and Leslie G. Valiant (1986 Nevanlinna Prize and 2010 Turing Award) each presented a lecture related to artificial intelligence or the modeling of the brain. Yoshua Bengio’s lecture on “Deep Learning for AI” provided a retrospective of some of the key principles behind the recent successes of deep learning. Dr. Bengio’s work has mostly been in neural networks, which are inspired by the computation found in the human brain. One of the key insights in the field came with the representation of words as vectors of numbers. This allowed relationships between words to be learned […]

The 7th annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) has officially begun! Yesterday (September 21st) was the opening ceremony, which included a “science slam” on the history and founding of HLF from Andreas Reuter, Scientific Chairperson of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation, as well as a Q&A session with Cherri M. Pancake, President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Carlos E. Kenig, President of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), and Hans Petter Graver, President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (DNVA). To top it off the opening ceremony was followed by a reception, giving the young researchers opportunities to mingle with each other and the 23 laureates in mathematics and computer science that are in attendance. During the Q&A session, Cherri Pancake was asked about the […]