Auditorium (Building IMAG)
25 November 2019 - 14h00
Technology is Driving the Future, But Who Is Steering?
by Moshe Vardi from Rice University
Abstract:
The benefits of computing are intuitive. Computing yields tremendous
societal benefits; for example, the life-saving potential of
driverless cars is enormous. But computing is not a game--it is
real--and it brings with it not only societal benefits, but also
significant societal costs, such as labor polarization,
disinformation, and smart-phone addiction. The common reaction to
this crisis is to label it as an ethical crisis and the proposed
response is to add courses in ethics to the academic computing
curriculum. This talk will argue that the ethical lense is too
narrow. The real issue is how to deal with technology's impact on
society. Technology is driving the future, but who is doing the
steering?
Short Bio:
Moshe Y. Vardi is a University Professor, the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering, and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University. He is the recipient of three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Blaise Pascal Medal, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award, the Southeastern Universities Research Association's Distinguished Scientist Award, and the ACM SIGLOG Church Award. He is the author and co-author of over 600 papers, as well as two books: Reasoning about Knowledge and Finite Model Theory and Its Applications. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the European Academy of Science, and Academia Europaea. He holds six honorary doctorates. He is currently a Senior Editor of of the Communications of the ACM, after having served for a decade as Editor-in-Chief.
