Time for two annual Turing awards

It is the season when we recognize an extraordinary research contribution to computing with the ACM A.M. Turing Award. I propose a change.

Shaping the foundations of programming languages

ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman discuss their early work, the 'Dragon Book,' and the future of 'live' computer science education.

Getting down to basics

2020 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman helped develop formal language theory, invented efficient algorithms to drive the tasks of a compiler, and put them all together in 'The Dragon Book.'

The web conference keynote - AI grand challenges

Everybody has opinions on grand challenges---bold tasks that capture the imagination of researchers and system builders---for AI. One of the earliest set of challenge goals was enunciated by Turing award winner and AAAI President, Raj Reddy, in 1988. I attempt to provide an accounting of the progress that has been made in the field, over the last three decades, towards those challenge goals. While some tasks such as the world-champion chess machine were accomplished in short order, many others remain incomplete. A new set of challenges for the current decade are also proposed, spanning the Health, Wealth and Wisdom spheres. Bridging the gap from narrow AI to general-purpose AI will be required to solve some of these challenges; teaming architectures in the service of humankind will also need to be emphasized. The mantra should be: Of the people, by the people with machines ; for the people!

What I Wish I Had Known Early in Graduate School but Didn’t

Begin with the end in mind!1 PhD students in artificial intelligence can start to prepare for their career after their PhD degree immediately when joining graduate school, and probably in many more ways than they think. To help them with that, I asked current PhD students and recent PhD computer-science graduates from the University of Southern California and my own PhD students to recount the important lessons they learned (perhaps too late) and added the advice of Nobel Prize and Turing Award winners and many other researchers (including my own reflections), to create this article.