Celebrating the Past, Present, and Future of Computing Timothy E

AI MATTERS, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3 SUMMER 2017

Celebrating the Past, Present, and Future of Computing Timothy E. Lee (Carnegie Mellon University; [email protected]) Justin Svegliato (University of Massachusetts Amherst; [email protected]) DOI: 10.1145/3137574.3137581

Abstract

Timothy Lee and Justin Svegliato, two Student SIGAI Scholars, cover The 50 Years of the ACM Turing Award Celebration, which con- vened in San Francisco last June. The semi- centennial celebration addressed the past, present, and future advancements of computing, ranging from deep learning and ethics to augmented reality and quantum computing.

As Student Scholars sponsored by SIGAI, we are grateful for the opportunity to be a part of The 50 Years of the ACM Turing Award Celebration. For two days in June, hundreds Figure 1: SIGAI at The 50 Years of the ACM Tur- of professors, researchers, and students from ing Award Celebration. Pictured from left to right: across the globe gathered together in San Timothy E. Lee, Yolanda Gil, and Justin Svegliato. Francisco to celebrate the legacy of the Tur- The bronze bust of Alan Turing unveiled during the ing Award (often referred to as the Nobel Prize conference is also shown here. of computing) and the incredible advances in computing over the last 50 years. The semi- centennial celebration also honored this year’s The first panel Advances in Deep Neural Net- Turing Award recipient, Tim Berners-Lee, for works was particularly relevant to the SIGAI inventing the World Wide Web and related net- community. Moderated by Judea Pearl, the working technologies such as the Semantic panel featured Michael Jordan (UC Berke- Web. ley), Fei-Fei Li (Stanford), Stuart Russell After opening remarks from a Turing laure- (UC Berkeley), Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI), and ate each day, we heard from several panels Raquel Urtasun (Toronto). As a popular area that spanned the field of computing, ranging not only in AI but also in computing in gen- from deep learning and ethics to augmented eral, deep learning has emerged as a powerful reality and quantum computing. Every panel approach for enabling machine intelligence. featured a distinguished moderator and sev- Sutskever explained that neural networks are eral panelists that included Turing laureates, essentially tunable circuits that learn high- prominent researchers, and rising stars in the dimensional mappings from data. Deep neu- field. Interleaved with the panels were sev- ral networks have emerged from the conflu- eral short films. These films featured the life ence of several factors: the recent advances in and work of the father of computer science, hardware (the “oxygen” of neural networks ac- Alan Turing, and highlighted the Turing lau- cording to Sutskever), the availability of mas- reates’ contributions, including those made to sive datasets via the Internet, and the accel- the field of artificial intelligence by the AI Tur- erated progress of data science. ing Award laureates. We were honored by the attendance of several AI Turing Award recipi- Despite their promising results, a common ents: Judea Pearl (2011 Turing laureate), Ed theme emerged from the panel. Although ef- Feigenbaum (1994 Turing laureate), and Raj fective in particular domains, deep learning in Reddy (1994 Turing laureate). its current form cannot be the fundamental abstraction of machine intelligence sought after Copyright c 2017 by the author(s). by researchers. There are many questions

22 AI MATTERS, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3 SUMMER 2017 about its long-term viability as the bedrock opening day of the celebration also featured of machine intelligence. As Jordan argued, four other panels with many prominent re- today’s neural networks are deep architec- searchers from industry and academia, along turally, but not semantically. Pearl questioned with a talk by 2008 Turing laureate Barbara whether these networks could reason about Liskov that explored the history of comput- causality, a central theme in his foundational ing. First, in Restoring Personal Privacy with- work on Bayesian networks. out Compromising National Security, Whitfield Diffie, 2015 Turing laureate, along with sev- Outlining the weaknesses of today’s deep eral leaders in security, cryptography, and net- neural networks segued into a discussion on working discussed how governments could the types of intelligent behavior that humans obtain useful information using backdoors and exhibit but these networks currently lack, such other intentional vulnerabilities to aid crimi- as semantic understanding, contextual rea- nal investigations without jeopardizing the pri- soning, abstraction, and reasoning under un- vacy of society. Following a short film on certainty, all of which are easily handled by hu- Alan Turing’s life, we then turned to Vint Cerf, mans despite little training data. Russell drew 2004 Turing laureate, and several other distin- a fitting analogy between Allen Newell, Cliff guished researchers in Preserving Our Past Shaw, and Herbert Simon’s General Problem for the Future. They considered the problem Solver and the need for exponential comput- of how to store data for centuries to come and ing with deep learning and the need for ex- whether corporations or governments should ponential data. In Russell’s opinion, hoping fund such an endeavor. to achieve “tabula rasa” machine intelligence with only deep learning may be infeasible in Later that day, Moore’s Law Is Really Dead: some—or all—domains due to the data de- What’s Next? headlined the 1992 Turing lau- mands, and so we must continue to search reate Butler Lampson. The panel explored for better techniques. Li offered a similar the ways in which the field can continue the anecdote from her work with ImageNet. With trend of exponential technological growth de- enough data, deep neural networks are by far spite that Moores Law has continued to slow the state of the art in object recognition, but down. During the panel, a common theme they perform poorly and cannot reason effec- emerged: researchers will eventually leverage tively without massive datasets. In the case special-purpose hardware and quantum com- of robotics, Urtasun noted that being unable puting to push the boundaries of computing to model uncertainty well in deep learning is a forward. considerable drawback in her current work on self-driving vehicles where algorithm robust- At the end of the day, we heard from Raj ness is critical. Reddy in Challenges in Ethics and Comput- ing. Given the increasing relevance of AI and Still, even with these shortcomings, deep machine learning, Reddy believes that ethi- learning performs quite impressively in nar- cal questions in computing have become more row problems, such as computer vision, image important than ever. Noel Sharkey added captioning, and object segmentation. In some several important questions in light of re- cases, such as AlphaGo, it enables decision- cent progress in self-driving cars and machine making capabilities that are superior to human learning. How can self-driving cars make de- intelligence. Several of the panelists agreed cisions that were once reserved for humans in that deep learning has matured enough to be life and death situations? And how do we en- used in industry, but the search for machine in- sure that data-driven algorithms escape bias telligence must continue. Ultimately, the panel against minorities in the justice system? could be best summarized by Li’s comments: we are entering the “end of the beginning” for On the final day of the conference, there were AI. Deep neural networks may be one of our two panels on some of the most rapidly grow- best existing tools for enabling the develop- ing fields in computing following a talk from ment of intelligent agents, but even greater Donald Knuth, 1974 Turing laureate. Quan- breakthroughs are yet to come. tum Computing: Far Away? Around the Cor- ner? Or Maybe Both at the Same Time? that In addition to the deep learning panel, the featured the 2000 Turing laureate Andrew Yao

23 AI MATTERS, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3 SUMMER 2017 investigated the current state of quantum computing and how it might drive software devel- Timothy E. Lee is a M.S. opment in the next 50 years. Like the deep student in Robotics at learning panel, John Martinis cautioned that Carnegie Mellon Univer- quantum computing is only a powerful tool in sity. As a member of certain combinatorial problems but useless in the Robust Adaptive Sys- others. However, in areas like AI, machine tems Lab under Profes- learning, and cryptography, it has the poten- sor Nathan Michael, Tim- tial to revolutionize the field. othy’s research focuses The celebration culminated with a panel on an on improving mobile robot area of computing that has recently seen rapid intelligence to enable the progress: Augmented Reality: From Gaming automation of challenging to Cognitive Aids and Beyond. Fred Books, tasks in real-world set- 1999 Turing laureate, and Ivan Sutherland, tings. He is currently in- 1988 Turing laureate, reminisced about the vestigating robust, vision-based navigation of early work of augmented reality while they a submersible robot to automate the precision were aspiring researchers. Peter Lee dis- inspection of underwater infrastructure. cussed the impact of augmented reality on Justin Svegliato is a the gaming industry. Other panelists consid- second year Ph.D. stu- ered Google Glass, Pokemon Go, and Oculus dent in Computer Science Rift and explored the inevitable future of aug- at the University of Mas- mented reality in the home and at the work- sachusetts Amherst. In place. the Resource-Bounded For all attendees across the spectrum of com- Reasoning Lab under puting, the advancements of the last 50 years Professor Shlomo Zilber- honored during the conference will undoubt- stein, Justin’s research edly shape our own contributions for the next focuses on bounded ratio- 50 years to come. And, for the SIGAI com- nality, real-time decision munity, the experts in our field gave insight making, and autonomous into the ongoing search for machine intelli- agent architectures. He is currently develop- gence and how deep learning might play a ing metareasoning techniques that monitor role. Given the recent groundbreaking ad- and control algorithms that trade decision vances in AI, it was only fitting that the cele- quality with computation time. bration of computing’s greatest achievements was in honor of who many call the grandfather of AI, Alan Turing.

Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge the support of SIGAI for the opportunity to attend The 50 Years of the ACM Turing Award Celebration. We also thank Yolanda Gil for her help with this article.