ACADEMIA

Edmund M. Clarke and Manuela Veloso, professors of computer science, are among the distinguished scientists invited to give talks at The Alan Turing Centenary Conference, June 22-24 in Manchester, England.

The conference hosted by the University of Manchester celebrates Turing, one of the most influential computer scientists of all time, on what would have been his 100th birthday.

Clarke, a pioneer in Model Checking, an automated technique for verifying hardware and software designs, shared the 2007 Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science. He is one of nine Turing laureates among the conference's invited speakers and one of four Turing laureates who are current or emeritus faculty members at Carnegie Mellon. He will present a lecture, "Model Checking and the Curse of Dimensionality."  

Veloso this summer will become president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence; at the Manchester conference, she will discuss "Symbiotic Autonomy: Robots, Humans, and the Web."

Other invited speakers include Vint Cert, Google senior vice president and Turing laureate; David Ferrucci, who led development of IBM's Watson question-answering system, and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.