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:
- Steven Ericsson-Zenith (IASE) - General Program Chair
- Whitfield Diffie (Cryptography, Stanford University) - Foundations Of Cryptography
- Solomon Feferman (Mathematics, Stanford University) - Theories Of Computation Over Arbitrary Structures
- Peter Norvig (Google) - Machine Intelligence
Program Committee:
- S Barry Cooper (ATY Chair, University of Leeds, UK)
- Leonard Susskind (Physics, Stanford University)
- Christof Koch (Cognitive and Behavioral Biology, Caltech)
- Richard Fikes (CS, Stanford University, Emeritus)
- Dennis Allison (EE, Stanford University)
- Paul Skokowski (CSLI, Stanford University)
- Eric Weinstein (Mathematician/Economist, Natron Group)
- Eugene Miya
- Jack Copeland (Philosophy, Canterbury University, NZ)
- M. David May (Computer Science, Bristol University, UK)
- Benjamin Wells (CS and Mathematics, University of San Francisco)
- Christof Teuscher (ECE, Portland State)
- Paul Borrill (CTO, Replicus Inc.)
- Adam Beberg - Conference Treasurer
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.
