Despite our challenges, individuals are still putting events to celebrate Alan Turing this year at Stanford University.
The day after tomorrow, Wednesday May 2nd, I will be introducing Jack Copeland who will give the "Alan Turing Centenary Lecture:"
The Alan Turing Centenary Lecture: Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age.
The Stanford University Mathematics Department Logic seminars this year, run by Sol Feferman and Grisha Mints, are dedicated to the Alan Turing Centenary.
Stanford Mathematical Logic Seminars
On the 8th of May, I will be speaking on my approach to logic and computation in "Logic and computation as biophysics," a talk that follows the same theme as the Turing talks I expect to give in England in June.
I am pleased also that Princeton managed to put on a stella ATY event this year.
Let me first be clear that I hold Stanford University in the very highest regard and that I write this account in that light with the hope that it will be accepted as a constructive and informative critique of recent events. I present the facts only as I see them, and I do not speak for any other member of the committee. There are surely other points of view.
I am an independent scholar. I am one of several such scholars that hang out at Stanford. In general, Stanford is a uniquely welcoming campus for such independents to interact, test and temper their skills and arguments. Often here we are individuals from the high-technology industry finding our way back to deeper concerns in science and academia.
Over the past decade I have spent much of my time on campus. I prize my independence but do consider myself a part of the informal intellectual community that surrounds Stanford. I often participate in the variety of academic seminars in my areas of interest across departments and have run two seminars at CSLI (the Center for the Study of Language and Information), the last one with the late John McCarthy.
When I first embarked upon my current research in 2004 I wrote to President Hennessy about my cross-discipline research seeking advice on how to proceed (essentially, my work is logic informed by new data in biophysics). I knew Hennessy and hoped that he remembered me, having declined an invitation from him to apply to Stanford when I was finishing my doctorate in 1992. I observed that my research does not fit into the current divisions of disciplines on campus. He encouraged me to reach out to the Stanford faculty to promote my inquiry and vision that there are new foundational things to discover. Periodically I have sent him an update on my progress and experiences on campus.
Three individuals play a historical role in my research: Charles Sanders Peirce, Rudolf Carnap and Alan Turing. In late 2009 Barry Cooper announced (on FOM, the Foundations of Mathematics discussion list) that there would be a major international celebration of Alan Turing and his contribution in 2012 (Alan Turing Year - ATY).
Seeing the many pedagogical events that were being suggested I saw an opportunity to include a research event of a special kind, one that would provide the community with an opportunity to both clarify Alan Turing's contribution in the face of contemporary interpretations and reawaken his field of inquiry. I hoped too that we may make further progress. My motivation for this approach being to honor Alan Turing in his rigorous and challenging spirit and to serve the field of inquiry that is my own. And so I conceived of the "Challenging Turing" conference.
My first step was to run the idea by the relevant scholars that I know: Jack Copeland, a well-known Turing scholar; Martin Davis, the "local" Turing scholar who has been working out of Berkeley since he retired; and Sol Feferman, a leading logician at Stanford, one of the best logicians in the world today.
It is here that I encounter my first political dynamics. I discovered that Jack had not yet been enrolled in the ATY European effort and had been marginalized to some extent. Martin, at least, felt that Jack owed the community an apology for a Scientific American article that discussed Turing's "Oracle," a concept introduced briefly in Turing's doctoral thesis at Princeton, and this lingering dispute had gone on for almost a decade. Martin has written about the technical issues in several places.
Honestly, Martin makes a compelling criticism of Jack's Scientific American article but otherwise Jack often makes arguments with which I agree, especially concerning the contemporary interpretation of Alan Turing. Despite the technical disagreement I see no good reason for the community to exclude Jack and so I conducted a little bridge building that played some role in smoothing the waters internationally. Jack and Sol later joined the Challenging Turing program committee.
I discovered later, incidentally, that there also exists a long standing animosity between Jack and Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges that may have complicated our ability to attract Andrew Hodges attention but this is not relevant here. I am unapologetically insensitive to political concerns and this will come to bite me later.
By this time I had been sufficiently encouraged by feedback to my proposal, Sol Feferman introduced me to Barry Cooper and I submitted a proposal to the international committee for an event to be held at Stanford. Barry, in fact, had similar ideas to my own as to what was needed and greeted the proposal warmly (see the Issac Newton Institute's "Incomputable" event). Barry, Jack, Martin and Sol, agreed to give me informal advice as I moved forward with the plan.
The international ATY committee approved the event as a part of the international celebrations and there I had to let things rest for six months as I spent time in Connecticut, during which I reconnected with colleagues in Computer Science and Neuroscience at Yale and enjoyed my first "real winter" in 17 years.
Upon my return to Silicon Valley in the spring of 2010 I connected with Dennis Allison, a well-known colleague that lectures at Stanford EE/CS Computer Systems Laboratory and runs the Computer Systems Colloquium EE380, one of the regular seminars in which I participate and informally advise. He was enthusiastic about my Challenging Turing proposal and suggested that we should broaden its scope beyond the 90 person research event I had envisioned. He argued convincingly that Stanford would surely wish to put on a major event to celebrate Alan Turing.
It turns out that another old friend also attends EE380 regularly, although we had never met in person, we knew each other from email and comp.parallel usenet interactions during the late 1980s and early 1990s. We had sat in the same auditorium for years without connecting the dots. I can't actually tell you what this old friend does, because I don't really know, but let's just say he's well connected with the variety of agencies here and throughout the Western Alliance. He is also a fierce networker among the top tier of CS inteligentsia. Dennis and I drew him into our circle of now active organization and the three of us set about expanding our group of active and informal advisors. We were at the committee building stage.
There is one additional piece of politics that I should mention before moving along because it happened in the fall of 2010. It is not clear if this is in any way related to the later problems. I mention it only for completeness.
As Dennis and I began to widen our circle it seemed important to be as inclusive as possible of all sides of the spectrum of interest in Alan Turing, and so naturally it made sense to us to invite Stephen Wolfram to participate. This suggestion was not well received by all my advisors but again disregarding political considerations I felt it important to include Wolfram, not least because he has a significant impact upon contemporary conceptions of Alan Turing and the interpretations of his work (that, admittedly, I seek to correct).
So, no sooner did we begin to build our effort and we hit a second round of politics. What happened? In short, the message was this: Stephen Wolfram has his own agenda of which Alan Turing is a part and if Stanford is going to do a Turing event of any kind then it should surely be owned, organized by Stephen Wolfram, with him as curator.
An extraordinary exchange of email occurred between Dennis, Hector Zenil, and Stephen Wolfram that went along the following lines: We know of Steven Ericsson-Zenith, sorta (I've never met either Wolfram or Zenil), we don't like what he's doing or what he says, Turing should not be challenged. Dennis, and I assume John Hennessy, would have none of it.
We held our first formal organization committee meeting in January 2011 and continued until this past month to hold monthly meetings. We invited everyone that we knew to the first meeting including John White, the head of ACM, Dag Spicer, a curator at the Computer History Museum, members of CS faculty, Symbolic Systems and other interested parties. The ACM had not yet begun to consider events for ATY, so we were able to introduce John White of ACM to Barry Cooper (who had called into the meeting from England), and we speculated about the range of cooperations that would be possible. It was very exciting.
Vaughan Pratt also participated at the first meetings. Vaughan is a CS Theorist, an Emeritus CS Professor, that I respect greatly. I'll go through the players in the next installment but one of the things that will hit us later is that while we attract the participation of Emeritus faculty, faculty with joint appointments between disciplines (computational biophysicist Russ Altman, for example), non-CS disciplines with an interest in the nature of computation (Lenny Susskind, for example), we have no active CS faculty involved nor do any appear after canvasing and networking.
At this first meeting we reported on our efforts to date. It was October 29th, 2010 when Dennis first wrote to John Hennessy advocating the project asking for his advice on how to proceed. Hennessy wrote that he was supportive and suggested we contact Stanford Conference Services for logistical support. He encouraged us to reach out to the Stanford departments and faculty. On November 30th, 2010 Dennis invited Hennessy to be General Chair of the event but he begged off any deep involvement because of his commitments over the timeframe involved.
I approached several other senior level Stanford people, including the provost John Etchemendy, about taking the General Chair role. My hope was to find a General Chair for the event, a Stanford luminary, that had a professional reason for being interested in Alan Turing and could cross the spectrum of departments, and would be someone whose participation would be seen to honor Turing.
Dennis arranged with the Computer Forum, an affilate of the CS department, for me to have a Stanford account so that I could represent the conference. We had a lot of work to do, but we were on our way.
Why did we not approach the Chair of the CS department at this point you may ask? Others on the committee had established relationships with the CS department and assured me that active CS involvement was inevitable. So initially we left it to them. I'll get involved with the CS department when it becomes clear in the summer of 2011 that the response was not the expected one.
Our mailing list for the monthly meetings and agendas included all active participants and informal friends, several of whom are active faculty in the CS department, including John Hennessy.
In the second part of this account I'll cover the activities and development of the project over the past year, my engagement with Jennifer Widom (the CS faculty chair), acts of sabotage and disinformation, inappropriate attacks upon a number of committee members, and other issues that the organizing committee faced after this promising start.
Before I begin the second part of my account, let me offer a note of caution. I will report several events that will no doubt appear petty in isolation and it is important, at least to me, that by reporting them that I am not petty myself.
Naively perhaps, I assume that people are acting with goodwill, and here I have no doubt that the people involved acted so, even though it may superficially appear otherwise. The conflict arises only because we pursue different objectives and different conceptions of how to handle such conflicts. I'll leave the matter for you to judge.
In recent years the Stanford University Computer Science Department has done a remarkable job of building out its curriculum, with many more students participating than a decade ago. The effect has been to give CS a dominant role across a major part of the university.
In the revamping of the curriculum, however, CS appears to have deminished "science" in favor of "engineering." There is nothing wrong with an engineering focus in and of itself, except that here an important part of the curriculum, of interest to fewer undergraduates perhaps, has been mislaid. While opportunities presented by computer engineering and industry development are immediate, the foundational aspects of computer science are taken for granted.
This should, however, alarm any science and any research university that pursues it. The engineering community can happily continue without worrying too much about basic science, until they awaken one morning to the surprise of the next scientific revolution.
The greatest benefits to humanity and our economies come from breakthroughs in basic scientific research. I'm sure that I do not need to defend that position here.
In hindsight, I should, perhaps, have been aware of these changes on campus. However, in fact it provided a new impetus for the conference, to stimulate students and faculty about this concern.
Over the period of this transformation at Stanford there has been an acceleration of use of and interest in computation as the vehicle of both discovery and explanation across disciplines outside of mathematics and computer science. The other disciplines are curious about what they are doing exactly when they utilize computation, they are interested in its scope and limits. And this is largely because it informs the foundations of their disciplines and familiar mathematics is not computation, although computation is certainly mathematics of a certain kind.
This proved to be a dynamic that affected us because while many across campus were interested and supportive of the conference and its goals, they looked to the CS department for leadership in these foundational matters, where none is to be found. At least, as currently configured.
The basic science of computer science is mathematical logic. Unfortunately, many people think that this subject is a done deal, whose further progress is limited to peccadilloes.
As you will see in the following post I become aware of how this dynamic plays on Stanford campus only this year as a result of a discussion with Ken Taylor, head of Symbolic Systems, and of the extent to which this posed a problem for us. Stanford has precious few logicians and the presentation of the subject where it is taught for vocational needs is cold and uninteresting. The problem is mirrored in mathematics and so real work in logic tends to fall into the crack between mathematics and computer science. In a letter to AMS recently David A. Edwards wrote:
"My mathematics colleagues almost never think about mathematical logic ... Mathematical logic is almost never taught in mathematics departments — it’s taught in computer science departments and philosophy departments — and, when it is, it is taught in a purely technical way with no concern for history or philosophy."
To which Dana Scott responds on FOM:
"In this Turing Year should we not try to make logic more relevant? And should we not try to make the teaching of logic more interesting?"
Indeed, we should.
The good news, however, is that the Stanford University Mathematics Department has an understanding of these questions and early in November 2011, during a meeting with Sol Feferman, Whitfield Diffie, Steve Kerckhoff (Chair of Mathematics) and myself the Mathematics Department agreed to be one of the sponsors of the event. Even-so, this and the willingness of other departments to join us, was insufficient to overcome the political onslaught from the Computer Science Department that followed.
Why bother to tell this sorry little tale? This is not an unreasonable question and you really should inspect my motives.
I admit that I am uncomfortable publishing these details. I do so because I believe in transparency and that the Stanford community will benefit from knowing them. I've hesitated writing this last part because I feel sullied by the storm. I trust that in the cause of transparency retelling the tale is somewhat less sordid than the acts reported.
And it's not enough to applaud transparency. I admit that I felt just a little bit defensive when a couple of CS professors, one at Stanford, tweeted poorly informed comments when I announced the dissolution of the committee.
I encourage those that object to my account to provide their own. I hope in any case that I will be corrected in any factual error by those involved. I have now discussed my report with leading members of the commitee and it would be fair to say that while they are uncomfortable with revealing the details I have received no objection to my doing so.
If there were objections to our effort from any corner of Stanford then they needed to be stated plainly. Attacks upon the person of committee members were an inappropriate means of expressing that objection.
Nor are my own actions beyond reproach.
At one juncture I removed Carl Hewitt from the committee and asked him to find support among the program chairs. Carl had attended all the organization meetings and joined the program committee at my invitation, prompted by Dennis. But I came to feel that his self-promotion both during the meetings and on the committee mailing list was inappropriate, and despite assurances from Dennis and Eugene that Carl could be helpful, I saw no ready sign of it.
I also felt that his antics had chased off Vaughan Pratt and maybe others during the summer. Vaughan's participation was important, at least to me (Vaughan and Carl have a long history together). The final straw for me was when Carl asked that I list him on the committee as the Chairman of a Society to promote "Inconsistency Robustness."
Most of what Carl says about "Inconsistency Robustness" makes no sense to me and the very idea seems, at best, poorly worded. He conflates two different ideas I think. The first logical consistency, the second simple variation or variety of behavior. He mixes up the formal notion with the informal use of the term. What-is-more, Carl publishes what strikes me as plain nonsense regarding Alan Turing, Tony Hoare, and others. After much personal anguish, and accepting that the failure in understanding could be mine, in September 2011 I withdrew my support for his participation and asked him to find support from the other Program Chairs. None was forthcoming.
I should, perhaps, have been more tolerant.
Carl and I had lunch recently and I said far more then to Carl directly than I have said above. My criticism is not personal, it is mostly technical, and the fault, I accept, may be mine. Carl has informed me that the Turing/Hoare comments I mention above will be published in Hector Zenil's World Scientific book on Turing this year. So others appear to make sense of them.
It has been suggested that Carl acted against the interests of the conference before and after these events but I do not know this to be the case. Carl is mostly harmless.
I offer this account to balance the following; to disclose the imperfect acts by all that impacted the demise of this conference. Whether this detail has an impact on the rest of the tale I do not know.
According to the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, Alan Turing is "often regarded as the father of computer science." Often? I assumed that there was no question concerning Alan Turing's role in the foundation of computer science but it seems this assumption is not so clear to others.
It came as some surprise for me to see the Computer History Museum pay Alan Turing small attention. For ACM "Alan Turing" is a brand and so selling the idea to them that they should do something special was relatively easy. Although Barry Cooper expressed concern after the first meeting in January 2011 that they would go off on their own and ignore funding the research conference at Stanford, which is exactly what they did.
There was no doubt on the committee that Alan Turing deserves recognition as the father of computer science, but our view was not shared it seems by CS faculty.
Some, like Stephen Wolfram, simply do not like the idea of "Challenging Turing." The idea, I suppose, rather rocks the boat. Turing would himself, I believe, want to be challenged but to challenge Alan Turing requires that we do so in his spirit and with the same rigor.
Turing's great virtue was an open mind and a pragmatic mathematical skill. He could identify ways and means of making progress while leaving certain questions, like locality, unanswered. His work in biophysics, recall, did not use his computational model but rather used differential equations. He would deplore our failure to challenge his ideas, I believe, and urge us not to take them for granted.
Committee members had a variety of agendas. I had my original agenda promoting my own field of inquiry, others wanted to simply celebrate Turing's contribution, others wanted to tell Turing's story.
Juggling these objectives was the first subject of our meetings. In the end we decided to supplement the conference with a public dinner, likely to be held at the Computer History Museum, and on campus showings of documentaries about Alan Turing's life. We also anticipated reaching out to the local gay community, on campus and off campus, whom I was assured would want to contribute funding. In addition, there are other communities locally that expressed an interest in joining our effort.
In particular, the cryptography community has a special interest in Alan Turing. Initially, I could not see how to fit this community into what we had planned. But then Eugene arranged for me to meet Whitfield Diffie.
Whit argued convincingly that there was room in the program for cryptography in terms of both the influence that cryptography had upon the foundations of computation and in terms the broader question of decoding. Whit agreed to chair this portion of the program and reliably appeared at every meeting.
Our planning moved along quite nicely in early 2011 across departments with many interested parties prepared to join us but it became increasingly clear that the enthusiastic response that everyone expected from the Computer Science Department was not happening.
Given the lack of headway with CS, in June 2011 Eugene and I went along to a lunch-time meeting where several faculty members were present, including the CS Chair, Jennifer Widom.
At first I took Jennifer Widom's reluctance as two fold: the first, justified caution, and the second, our subject is outside of her professional interests. Obviously, as CS Chair she is right to be circumspect and to look to the active faculty to express an interest in the event and she promised to circulate details from me to the faculty list.
However, at this meeting I was alarmed by Widom's sniping at two members of the committee, her comments, publicly made, seemed inappropriate.
Adam Beberg is a Stanford doctoral candidate introduced to me by Dennis, he holds a Masters degree from Stanford. He is in the final stages of completing his Ph.D. His experience with the Stanford administration as student organizer made him a welcome part of the committee. Due to illness and family matters Adam has had to drop from the doctoral program but I know that Adam is expected to return at some point and succeed.
To hear Widom tell the story, however, Adam was "kicked-out" of the doctoral program and was misrepresenting his affiliation with the CS Department. Whatever the facts, and afterward I confirmed that this characterization is not the general view, it seems inappropriate for a member of faculty to speak about a Stanford student this way.
Widom also sniped disapprovingly at Dennis Allison as another misrepresenting their affiliation.
At the time, however, I simply attributed this attitude to caution and disinterest, a difficulty that we could overcome with a little effort.
In the summer of 2011 Widom did circulate a note from me to the Stanford CS Faculty. I know this because I was copied. We received no response from CS faculty but continued to canvas them.
We hoped to release a CFP during the summer but I did not feel able to until matters with the CS department were clear. I would have proceeded without them had it not been for the clear expectation from other departments on campus, including the mathematics department, that they participate. Sol had early on offered to sign up the mathematics department and philosophy department but I had been holding him off to allow CS to lead.
In the summer of 2011, in order to overcome these delays in some part, Lester Earnest agreed to underwrite the event. This allowed us to begin serious planning and external sponsorship solicitations.
Lester Earnest was the head of SAIL (the Stanford AI Lab.) during it's hey day with John McCarthy. He is a retired member of the Computer Science Department. Everyone that I have spoken to has lauded Les as the powerful leader of SAIL's efforts. It is understating the case to say that Lester Earnest's career at Stanford is largely responsible for its major standing in AI.
However, Les was not a tenured faculty member, not a Professor like John McCarthy, but a Senior Research Scientist, he is considered to be outside of the ivory tower. Les certainly has the right to call himself "Emeritus Stanford University" by any measure, in my view. But he too will come under attack in December 2011 with petty accusations by Widom that he is misrepresenting himself.
Recall that in early November, conscious of our timelines and hoping to prompt CS, we had finally formalized the participation of the mathematics department. I thought this may be sufficient to prompt participation from CS faculty. But immediately it changed the tone of CS activity toward us, in the negative.
In November 2011 we have world-class program chairs, major external contributors, a strong organizing committee from across disciplines, we needed one more program chair for computation over natural behaviors and an overall chair, a position that I was holding in the interim. We still needed to build a program committee under the program chairs, but this effort was being delayed by the uncertainty. With the help of Stanford University Conference Services we already had all the budget and logistical options sorted out.
In December we decided that I, with the ATY almost upon us, should again solicit Jennifer Widom's support. So I sent her an email asking if we could send a new request for participation to the CS faculty. She asked me a number of questions and that Sol and John Hennessy send her notes of support. Sol promptly responded and addressed the CS faculty through her. I sent a copy of an email that John Hennessey that he had sent to me in May 2011 after I asked him for clarification of what I could say about his support to the faculty. I also sent a note addressed to faculty soliciting participation in the conference.
According to Widom this note was eventually sent to faculty in January 2012, after significant delay, during which Widom challenged not only Lester Earnest's affiliation with Stanford but also Peter Norvig. I had listed Peter as Google/Stanford because Peter is currently running, with Sebastian Thrun, the largest AI course in history at Stanford.
Most of the committee did not see the email exchange between Widom and Earnest. Whatever the technical nature of the complaint, it seemed entirely inappropriate to me. It was discouraging to me, it felt like betrayal to Les, I'm sure.
Widom eventually claimed to circulate our request for participation and Sol's note to the faculty in January but I saw no sign of it. So I began sending both an invite to participate and a copy of Sol's note directly to faculty.
I gained no response from active faculty but two Emeritus Faculty, Ed Feigenbaum and Richard Fikes, signed up. Ed Feigenbaum appears to have joined the committee solely for the purpose of sabotage.
We were forced to relocate our January organization meeting to the EE Department because CS now objected to our use of the meeting rooms in Gates.
During the January organization meeting Ed expressed fatigue over all the events (in Europe) related to Alan Turing. He suggested that we withdraw and spin an announcement to claim that our success was to establish the ACM event. I objected to the suggestion as dishonest.
A couple of days later we received a note from Lester Earnest to say he was withdrawing from the committee. Since Les was underwriting the event this was a blow; we had lost our funding.
I wrote to Les asking him what had happened, knowing that the exchange with Widom over the December holiday was surely sufficient to deter and depress anyone.
A few hours later Ed Feigenbaum wrote to the committee saying the he had not spoken to Les but that he would withdraw from the committee himself. This puzzled both I and Les because Les had just told me that Ed that had talked him out of supporting the conference. Ed Feigenbaum, Les reports, manipulated him and then lied to us.
For completeness, I eventually went to speak with Mark Horowitz, head of EE, in January. He begged off pleading that he did not want to face the politics that CS were generating. I can't say I blame him, this was now becoming a general defense.
In November, with the mathematics department as a sponsor, Symbolic Systems were ready to also sponsor the event and then to my surprise they turned around. I was not given details, only that pressure from CS had prevented them.
In late January I met with Ken Taylor, head of Symbolic Systems, to find out what had happened. Ken was apologetic, he had wanted to support the conference he said, and - indeed - if we were able to find peace with the CS department he still would. Jennifer Widom had spoken to them.
I strategized a bit with Ken about how to proceed and he suggested I speak to Stanley Peters at CSLI, whom - he felt - would be less vulnerable to CS political antics. He would speak with Peters himself.
We also spoke about the lack of support for logic and foundations on campus. I became aware of a long conflict on campus between those that feel logic, and hence the foundations of computation, is a done deal and those, including Ken, that have tried to gain a stronger presence for logic. My own view is well known: there is work to do.
CSLI had always been on our list of potential sponsors but I had delayed approaching them in order to get CS involved. Peters would later say to me that I should have come to them first, he's right.
My first meeting with Stanley Peters went very well. I like everyone at CSLI. He was enthusiastic about what he heard and said that he would speak to the CSLI board. I was finally able to reconnect with him two weeks later. He was still enthusiastic and said that CSLI wanted to support the event and for CSLI to be considered "fellow tavelers." I had to push back. I said that to succeed at this point, to overcome CS politics, I needed clear support on campus and so felt that I needed to announce that CSLI would sponsor with the Mathematics Department and that would make me hopeful that I could build sufficient support to bring in Symbolic Systems and, perhaps, Philosophy later. He understood and took it as a task with a promise to get back to me.
There was a slightly embarrassed and different tone in our next meeting. Obviously someone was challenging my leadership in the event and Peters was embarrassed to mention it. At the next meeting he apologized and said he was unable to offer what we needed.
I want to offer my own apology to the committee for not being able to overcome these challenges. I thank you all for your time, your support, and your company over the past year or more.
Let me assure the community that, in my experience, everyone on campus outside of Stanford University Computer Science Department was very supportive and wanted the conference to happen. Where it was apparent they, without expectation, lamented appearing as cowards in the face of a bully. They have broader considerations, I know.
Sol Feferman will give two talks in April related to Alan Turing (Turing's Oracle and computing over the reals and other structures) and has invited me to speak at the Mathematics Department Mathematical Logic Symposium on May 8th on my approach to logic and computation and the next quarter logic symposium with have an Alan Turing focus. Dennis and I have arranged for Jack Copeland to be at Stanford University on May 2nd, giving a Turing talk at EE380, the Computer Systems symposium run by Dennis.
Dennis and I are about to assemble a page of events in and around Stanford that will be related to Turing this year.
Happy 100th Birthday Alan.
Out of respect for friends that seek an opportunity to comment privately, I've taken my account of what happened off-line while I consult with them. It will give me a opportunity to tidy up my remarks too.
Be assured that I remain committed to transparency, by taking the account off-line I am simply respecting my friends that wish for me to consider their comments before making the account generally available. I expect this process to take no more than seven days.
I also invite responses from those affected by my account, I commit to posting any such responses here.
In the meantime I will make a copy of my account available if you request it directly from me at stevene@stanford.edu.
After discussion with the program chairs and the local organizing committee, yesterday I sent the following email to Barry Cooper, Chair of the International ATY committee. Barry is also a member of the Challenging Turing committee. I also copied the wider program committee:
Dear Barry,
Despite wide support at Stanford for our conference plans, the sponsorship of the mathematics department, world-class program chairs, and the support for our efforts by Stanford President John Hennessy; in the face of a lack of support in important Stanford departments, the indifference of the Stanford CS faculty, and political moves since November, and after discussion with the program chairs and the local organizing committee, we have decided to dissolve the committee and abandon our efforts. This is largely because we no longer feel that we can assemble a conference that is of a high enough standard to serve Alan Turing.
Those of us involved from the beginning are naturally disappointed.
Thank you for your support and that of the ATY committee. Our best wishes for the efforts of the International committee and the remaining events this year.
I wish to extend my deep appreciation to colleagues across disciplines (copied here) that agreed to participate on the program committee and especially note the unwavering support of the program chairs: Whitfield Diffie, Peter Norvig, Sol Feferman. Special thanks also to the participants of the local organizing committee, especially Dennis Allison and Eugene Miya. My thanks to those on the above CC list that have privately given me guidance and advice from the earliest stages.
With respect,
Steven
I have recieved several notes of disappointment. Yes, it's aweful. People behaved badly.
Unfortunately, I can't say that it was just one individual. Although the Chair of the Stanford University Computer Science Department was actively hostile, the indifference of others was equally damaging, and the skullduggery of one or two standout.
Motivations vary for this behavior and are difficult to pin down. The possible motivations range from NIH (the "not invented here" syndrome) and Nationalism, some feel Alan Turing's contribution is inflated in the face of American contributions, to homophobia and fear of atheism. Some hide behind the claim that Turing should not be challenged, a motivation that I am certain Turing would abhor more than the others.
In some cases there was simply a surprising confusion about what "Computer Science" is, people doing "Computer Engineering" in Silicon Valley, including the Stanford Computer Science Department, do not see the relevance of Alan Turing's level of inquiry, they have "apps" to build. Others on campus, unfamiliar with the state of play there and intimidated by the large role the CS department plays on campus, simply looked to the CS department for leadership. Others still were merely deterred by the politics.
I will write it up in full at some point.
My thanks to everyone involved for their support.
Steven
PROSPECTUS
"Challenging Turing 2012" is an academic research event, with the usual peer review, aimed at celebrating Alan Turing's inquiry in the spirit of that inquiry: by the rigorous and systematic analysis of computational paradigms, their logical foundation for their own sake and their ability to characterize or reproduce behaviors in the world, including intelligent behavior.
We seek to reignite the inquiry, clarify the Challenges that Turing addressed, how Turing would view contemporary interpretations of computation, and hope to stimulate and, perhaps, make further progress. Therefore, the nature of computation is a central theme of the conference.
Alan Turing's work has been broadly influential and it is our intent that the conference attract participation across disciplines that utilize computation to characterize or reproduce natural behaviors.
The question concerning computation in biophysics, for example, is most often incorrectly stated. It is not so much "What is the computational model of biophysical behavior by current standards?" but rather Turing's Challenge that can be summarized as: "Are the current standards of computation sufficient?" and, if not, "How may we identify a computational paradigm that allows us to characterize biophysical behavior?"
Alan Turing would not have supported contemporary expectations that the standard model of computation is sufficient. He acknowledged, in particular, the issue of non-locality in what he termed "consciousness" but put the question aside in order to make progress. And, indeed, he did make progress, demonstrating that it is possible to imbue machines with aspects of our intelligence.
As a consequence the Turing model of computation has been hugely successful and has transformed modern culture, societies and the fortunes of nations. This success deserves celebration in its own right. Yet Turing fully recognized that his contribution was far from a final solution. And so in this event we seek to rekindle an interest in the hard foundational questions that Turing faced.
There will be many pedagogical events celebrating Alan Turing in 2012. Continuing his inquiry and encouraging further progress is a unique way for Stanford University and the Silicon Valley community to recognize and honor Alan Turing's contributions. We plan for the event to be held September 5th thru 7th, 2012.
I am pleased to welcome Ed Feigenbaum and Richard Fikes, both emeritus Stanford Univeristy Computer Science professors to our program committee.
We are currently reviewing the dates of the conference and are likely to reschedule to a date in October / early November in the next few days in order to schedule the conference during the Stanford University semester.
This rescheduling is in order to meet our goal of stimulating interest in Alan Turing's level of inquiry amongst faculty and the student body.
After a meeting today between the Chair of the Stanford University Mathematics Department, Steve Kerckhoff, and Sol Feferman, Whitfield Diffie and myself, I am pleased to announce that the Stanford University Mathematics Department will be one of the sponsors of "Challenging Turing 2012" and that Sol Feferman will join the committee, Chair a part of the program and help us to strenghten the program committee.
Sol has been advising me informally from the beginning of this effort, two years ago, he is one of the first people I ran the idea by, and I am pleased to welcome him to the committee.
More sponsorship news soon.
I am now gathering commitments from invited programming committee members and recently sent out the following to everyone that had expressed an interest in participating.
Currently I have program committee commitments from the following:
Program Chairs:
Program Committee:
Our goal in this program is to invite papers from the variety of researchers across disciplines that are interested in the nature of computation, especially those that utilize computation to characterize natural behaviors.
Our emphasis is in the context of Alan Turing's inquiry and we anticipate that we will be able to structure the conference along the lines of the chronological narrative of Alan Turing's life. We hope to stimulate contributions that extend Alan Turing's inquiry in the spirit of that inquiry, the rigorous and systematic discipline that Turing embodied, and to elucidate the influences upon it.
We will weave together the threads of this inquiry leading from mathematical foundations and the foundations of logic, to the practical characterization of natural behaviors. Naturally, therefore, we have a particular interest in the scope and limits of computational paradigms. The Thesis of Alan Turing and the Thesis of Alonzo Church are therefore of special interest.
Turing's inquiry takes a general view of "computation," it is that behavior which can be derived from mathematics. "Computation" refers here not only to the operations of stored program computers but any machinery the behavior of which can be divined by mathematical characterization.
Driven in part by his well-known practical applications, especially in Cryptography, Turing naturally extended his inquiry to consider the implications of imbuing computing machinery with aspects of our intelligence. And, further, to the computation necessary to characterize natural behavior.
In his 1951 paper "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," published a few years before his suicide, Turing moved firmly in the direction of biophysical characterization. Yet here Turing turned away from his well-known computational paradigm to differential equations that expressed a non-locality, a concurrent behavior, difficult (if possible at all) to express with collections of Turing Machines where concurrency is a second-order consideration.
One can only imagine the advances that may have been forthcoming if Alan Turing had survived. And we must wonder how many solutions to computational problems, such as those currently surrounding computational concurrency, would have been resolved.
It is our mission in this conference to reignite the spark of Turing's deep inquiry and to continue to challenge the frontiers in his name.
In attendance:
Apologies from:
Key developments in this meeting include:
We discussed the CFP, sponsorship by various Stanford Departments, and strengthening the program committee before public release of the CFP.
Adam Beberg is unanimously elected conference Treasurer.
The Organization Meetings for the remainder of the year will be held on:
30th November, 2011
28th December, 2011
Today's meeting was attended by:
Apologies received from:
Today was a breakthrough meeting. Peter Norvig has asked us for a funding proposal to present to Google and Lester Earnest has agreed to underwrite the event. This allows us to establish the various accounts and to engage with Stanford University Conference Services.
Dear Committee Members and Friends,
There will be an organizing committee meeting at 4:00pm in Gates 359 on Wednesday the 31st August.
As the summer closes we have little more than 12 months to execute our plan, that should be plenty of time. In this meeting we need to review our objectives in the light of the economic necessities and constraints and make the necessary decisions to proceed.
We have the support of John Hennessy, numerous Emeritus faculty, Associates, Visitors and Independents. We have the support of Active Faculty from departments that utilize computation and have an interest in foundations, except CS. We continue to be short of critical active faculty members from Stanford CS (and EE) able to facilitate our cause. Other departments naturally look to the CS Department for leadership in this event.
Everyone is busy, of course, but I am disappointed at the response from the Stanford CS faculty given both the central contribution that Alan Turing has made to the discipline and the clear need to make further progress and continue efforts in Computer Science at his level of inquiry.
Please encourage your friends in CS and EE faculty to participate.
Separately, I will be contacting Program Committee members and Informal Advisors during September with the first draft of the Call-For-Papers. If you have thoughts about what you have seen outlined so far then please send them to me by email. I am on campus frequently so if you wish to talk about the conference privately or just swap notes on Alan Turing then I am happy to come to your office.
With respect,
Steven Ericsson-Zenith
on behalf of the Organizing Committee, Challenging Turing 2012
In attendance: Steven Ericsson-Zenith, Dennis Allison, Eugene Miya, Whitfield Diffie, Les Earnest, Paul Borrill, Carl Hewitt, Blaine Garst, Nathaniel Garst, Adam Beberg.
Alan Turing was born June 23rd, 1912.
During his short life he invented the stored program computer, became the first computational biologist and made contributions to cryptography that significantly shortened the conflict of WWII. In terms of the social impact of science, his contribution to the 20th Century is paralleled by few others, perhaps Einstein alone. Alan Turing's contribution changed everything, for everyone. No one is untouched by it.
Few of us are given the opportunity to make such a contribution, fewer still the opportunity and the ability to succeed. Alan Turing's vision of computation, machine intelligence and related questions pervade all scientific disciplines. He addressed questions as relevant to Logicians as they are Biologists and Neurophysiologists:
"The whole thinking process is still rather mysterious to us, but I believe that the attempt to make a thinking machine will help us greatly in finding out how we think ourselves." Alan Turing, 1951.
We will be celebrating Alan Turing's birthday and his visionary spirit with some cake at Stanford University tomorrow from 3:00-5:00 in the Gates Fujitsu Lounge (4th Floor).
Please join us.
With respect,
Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Program Chair, Challenging Turing 2012 (http://challengingturing.org)
on behalf of the Organizing Committee.
--
Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering
http://senses.info
Alan Turing took his own life and was found dead on June 8th, 1954. He had been found guilty of homosexual activity and punished by chemical castration.
At the start of WWII Turing broke the Enigma Code that the German high-command used to communicate with the UBoats blockading the British Isles at the time. His contribution to the successful conclusion of the war is incalculable.
Two years ago, the British government finally apologized for the injustice of his treatment. We are left to wonder what he would have achieved if he had survived.
We will be paying our respects to Alan Turing in a small local gathering at 4:00pm in Gates 200 on Wednesday (tomorrow) afternoon, the 8th. You are welcome to join us.
Today's meeting was attended by
I will post minutes later. Today's meeting was recorded on audio. We decided to convene an early meeting in two weeks since we are at a critical point for the assembly of funding and the organizational structure. Steven Ericsson-Zenith and Dennis Allison, in the interim, will write up a budget and revised conference plan and prospectus.
Jack Copeland, a Challenging Turing 2012 Program Committee member, presents Alan Turing's contribution to world history with an explanation of the role that Cryptography has played in the development of reasoning about natural behaviors.
This is the profile for the organizing and program committees for the 2012 Alan Turing Year events organized at Stanford University, California.
