The 50 Years of the ACM Turing Award Celebration

Our celebration will culminate with a conference on June 23 - 24, 2017 at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. ACM Turing laureates will join other ACM award recipients and experts in moderated panel discussions exploring how computing has evolved and where the field is headed.

Download a PDF of the Conference Schedule

Day 1, Friday, June 23

Turing Celebration:  8:30AM - 6:15PM

• Impact of Turing Recipients' Work (8:55 - 9:15AM)
  Speaker: Barbara Liskov (2008 Turing laureate)
• Advances in Deep Neural Networks (9:15 - 10:30AM)
  Deep neural networks can be trained with relatively modest amounts of information and then successfully be applied to large quantities of unstructured data. Their capabilities, in some domains, rival those of human beings. How are deep neural networks changing our world and our jobs and how may things further change going forward?
  Moderator: Judea Pearl (2011 Turing laureate)
  Panelists: Michael Jordan, Fei-Fei Li, Stuart Russell, Ilya Sutskever, and Raquel Urtasun
• Restoring Personal Privacy without Compromising National Security (11:10AM - 12:25PM)
  Panelists will explore how state-of-the-art cryptography, security, networked systems, and data-management technology might enable government agencies to acquire actionable, useful information about legitimate targets of investigation without intruding upon the electronic activity of innocent parties. They will also address the need to use laws and policies in conjunction with technology to hold government agencies accountable for proper use of private information.
  Moderator: Joan Feigenbaum
  Panelists: Whitfield Diffie (2015 Turing laureate), Bryan Ford, Nadia Heninger, and Paul Syverson
• Preserving Our Past for the Future (1:45 - 3:00PM)
  There is increasing interest in how to better preserve our electronic artifacts. This is problem for a number of fields that are using computing as a resource. How can we be sure we can read data and documents created decades ago? In a world where software changes monthly, how can we repeat experiments properly? Who pays to maintain our ability to access artifacts? What does the PDF/A experience tell us?
  Moderator: Craig Partridge
  Panelists: Vint Cerf (2004 Turing laureate), Brewster Kahle, Natasa Milic-Frayling, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, and Brent Seales
• Moore's Law Is Really Dead: What's Next? (3:45 - 5:00PM)
  The 50-year reign of Moore’s Law is over. Transistors are no longer getting much better, the power budgets of microprocessors are not increasing, and the single power-hungry processor has been replaced with several energy-efficient processors, the path to improve energy-performance-cost is specialized hardware. Microprocessors of the future will include special-purpose processors that do one class of computation much better than general-purpose processors. What doors will this seismic change close and what new doors will it open?
  Moderator: John Hennessy
  Panelists: Doug Burger, Norm Jouppi, Butler Lampson (1992 Turing Laureate), and Margaret Martonosi
• Challenges in Ethics and Computing (5:00 - 6:15PM)
  Recently the computing and ethics communities have come to realize that computing ethics is more complicated than we thought. Algorithms may have unintended biases with considerable social impact. Driverless cars have to make ethical decisions (protect the pedestrian or passenger?) formerly left to human drivers. Seemingly harmless research experiments on computing systems can harm humans. How do we address these issues, especially in a world where we push to deliver products at an ever quicker pace?
  Moderator: Deirdre Mulligan
  Panelists: Jennifer Chayes, Helen Nissenbaum, Raj Reddy (1994 Turing laureate), and Noel Sharkey

Turing Celebration Reception:  6:15PM - 8:15PM

Day 2, Saturday, June 24

Turing Celebration:  9:00AM - 12:30PM

• Computer Science as a Major Body of Accumulated Knowledge (9:05 - 9:20AM)
  Speaker: Donald Knuth (1974 Turing laureate)
• Quantum Computing: Far Away? Around the Corner? Or Maybe Both at the Same Time? (9:20 - 10:35AM)
  Quantum computing hardware is maturing swiftly. Depending on the expert you talk with, quantum computing is around the corner or a few years away. Concurrently, research on algorithms that take advantage of quantum computing is also moving briskly. In this discussion, we’ll look at where we are in both theory and practice, where we are headed, and what quantum skills the average computer scientist will eventually need.
  Moderator: Umesh Vazirani
  Panelists: Dorit Aharonov, Jay M. Gambetta, John Martinis, and Andrew Yao (2000 Turing laureate)
• Augmented Reality: From Gaming to Cognitive Aids and Beyond (11:05AM - 12:20PM)
  Augmented reality—the overlay of contextually-relevant digital information onto the real world—has captivated our imaginations both in fiction and in practice. In recent years we have seen everything from excitement and concern over the potential of worn displays such as Google Glass to the convergence of hordes of Pokemon-catching smartphone users in public parks and spaces. In this panel, we look forward, exploring how the sensing and sensory display technologies of augmented reality can empower individuals and communities.
  Moderator: Blair MacIntyre
  Panelists: Fred Brooks (1999 Turing laureate), Peter Lee, Yvonne Rogers, and Ivan Sutherland (1988 Turing laureate)

We hope you can join us via our live web stream, to look ahead to the future of technology and innovation, and to help inspire the next generation of computer scientists to invent and dream.