The Ada Lovelace Bicentenary Lectures on Computability
Augusta Ada Lovelace, acclaimed as the world’s first computer programmer, was born on 10th of December 1815. Daughter of the poet Byron, Ada collaborated with Victorian inventor Charles Babbage, who envisioned steam-age computers built out of cogwheels. She died at the tragically young age of 36.
Two centuries later, her contributions are being celebrated in the Ada Lovelace Bicentenary Lectures on Computability, kicked off by Ada’s 200th birthday party on December 10.
In the series of 15 lectures, to be held during December and January, an array of international stars of modern computer science will pay homage to Lovelace.
The line-up includes two winners of the coveted Turing Award — computer science’s Nobel Prize — as well as winners of the US Presidential Award, the US National Science Foundation’s Waterman Award, the Herbrand Award, IBM’s Outstanding Innovation Award, the Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research, the Gödel Prize, and a swathe of other distinguished tributes.
The lecture series is being hosted by the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies.
“Lovelace triumphed intellectually despite the rampant sexism of her era”, say the organizers of the lecture series Jack Copeland, Diane Proudfoot, and Eli Dresner. “Babbage studied at Cambridge University but Lovelace, as a woman, could not.”
The Lovelace Lectures will be held through December and January. Attendance is free of charge and the lectures are open to everyone.
PROGRAM FOR DECEMBER
20 December Opening lecture. TITLE by Dorit Aharonov (Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel). www.cs.huji.ac.il/~doria
21 December Computability in the Footsteps of Turing ¬— A Personal Trip, by David Harel (Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel). www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~harel
22 December What is an Algorithm?, by Yuri Gurevich (Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington). research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/gurevich
23 December Humans, Machines, and the Future of Work, by Moshe Vardi (Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA). www.cs.rice.edu/~vardi
31 December Explorations in Universality by Scott Aaronson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA). www.scottaaronson.com All lectures will be held at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Givat Ram, Jerusalem. Times are as follows: 11:00 - 11:15 Coffee and biscuits 11:15 - 12:15 The lecture 12:30 - 13:15 Break for lunch 13:15 - 14:15 Q & A with the lecturer 14:15 - 15:00 Afternoon tea The dates of the January lectures will be announced soon. The January lectures will be given by: Hajnal Andréka, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary. www.renyi.hu/~andreka Nachum Dershowitz, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. www.cs.tau.ac.il/~nachumd/Homepage.html Jo Francis, Flare Productions, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. www.mith.umd.edu/flare/about John Fuegi, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA. www.english.umd.edu/users/jfuegi Shafi Goldwasser, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. people.csail.mit.edu/shafi Istvan and Peter Nemeti, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary. www.renyi.hu/~nemeti Michael Rabin, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. www.seas.harvard.edu/directory/rabin Aaron Sloman, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs Mark Sprevak, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/people/mark-sprevak Susan Stepney, University of York, York, UK. www- users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan Doron Swade, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California, USA. www.computerhistory.org/events/bio/Doron,Swade Avi Wigderson, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, USA. www.math.ias.edu/avi/home