T100: Celebrating Alan Turing

Professor Philip Maini works in the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Oxford. Turing’s seminal paper “The chemical basis of morphogenesis”, published in 1952, proposed that pattern formation in early embryonic development was an emergent, or self-organising, phenomenon driven by diffusion. This ingeneous and highly counter-intuitive idea has formed the basis for an enormous number of subsequent studies from both experimental and theoretical viewpoints. Maini critiques the model, considers applications to skeletal patterns in the limb, animal coat markings, fish pigmentation and hair patterning, and describes how present-day research is still influenced by this paper. The Turing Research Symposium was organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics in partnership with SICSA and supported by Cambridge University Press.

Professor Maja Pantic is Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing at Imperial College London. A widely-accepted prediction is that computing will move to the background, weaving itself into the fabric of our everyday living spaces and projecting the human user into the foreground. To realise this prediction, next-generation computing should develop anticipatory user interfaces that are human-centered, built for humans, and based on naturally occurring multimodal human behaviour such as affective and social signalling. The Turing Research Symposium was organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics in partnership with SICSA and supported by Cambridge University Press.

Professor Barbara Grosz works in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, USA. In 1950, when Turing proposed to replace the question “Can machines think?” with the question “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”, computer science was not yet a field of study, Shannon’s theory of information had just begun to change the way people thought about communication, and psychology was only starting to look beyond Behaviorism. It is stunning that so many predictions in Turing’s 1950 Mind paper were right. In the decades since that paper appeared, with its inspiring challenges, research in computer science, neuroscience and the behavioural sciences has radically changed thinking about mental processes and communication. Turing, were he writing now, might still replace “Can machines think?” with an operational challenge, but Grosz expects he would propose a very different game. This talk describes research on collaboration, collective intentionality and human-computer communication that suggests abilities to work together with others and to participate in purposeful dialogue are essential elements of human intelligence. It presents results in several areas of artificial intelligence that support the imagining of computer systems able to exhibit such abilities. The Turing Research Symposium was organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics in partnership with SICSA and supported by Cambridge University Press.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili is Professor of Physics and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey. From cryptanalysis and the cracking of the German Enigma Code during the Second World War to his work on artificial intelligence, Alan Turing was without doubt one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. An extraordinarily gifted mathematician, he is rightly regarded as the father of computer science having set in place the formal rules that govern the way every computer code ever written actually work. This lecture will be a celebration of one man’s enigmatic yet ultimately tragic life – a whirlwind tour of his genius, from whether computers can have consciousness to how a leopard gets its spots. Jim Al-Khalili OBE is an Iraqi-born British theoretical physicist, author and science communicator. He is Professor of Theoretical Physics and Chair in the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey. He has become a familiar science personality in the British media. He has hosted several BBC productions about science and is a frequent commentator about science in other British media venues. This was a joint lecture between the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. Recorded on Thursday 10 May 2012 at the George Square Lecture Theatre, The University of Edinburgh.

Professor Steve Furber works in the School of Computer Science at Manchester University. When his concept of the universal computing machine finally became an engineering reality, Alan Turing speculated on the prospects for such machines to emulate human thinking. Although computers now routinely perform impressive feats of logic and analysis, such as searching the vast complexities of the global internet for information in a second or two, they have progressed much more slowly than Turing anticipated towards achieving normal human levels of intelligent behaviour, or perhaps “common sense”. Why is this? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the principles of information processing in the brain are still far from understood. But progress in computer technology means that we can now realistically contemplate building computer models of the brain that can be used to probe these principles much more readily than is feasible, or ethical, with a living biological brain. The Turing Research Symposium was organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics in partnership with SICSA and supported by Cambridge University Press.

The Turing Research Symposium Lecture 2 by Dr Elham Kashefi: Quantum Turing Test. A fundamental goal in quantum information processing is to test a machine’s (or more generally nature’s) ability to exhibit quantum behaviour. The most celebrated result in this domain, which has been also demonstrated experimentally, is the celebrated Bell Theorem that verifies the non-local nature of quantum mechanics. Could we generalise such approaches to verify that a given device is in fact taking advantage of quantum mechanics rather than being a disguised classical machine? Considering the exponential regime of quantum mechanics, the issue of the efficiency of such tests is the key challenge from the complexity point of view. On the other hand, from the foundational point of view, it is an intriguing open question whether a fully classical scheme could verify any quantum properties of a larger system while being experimentally feasible. Kashefi presents some recent progress towards this direction that also has surprising consequences on an entirely different open question, the existence of fully homomorphic encryption schemes. Presented by Dr Elham Kashefi, School of Informatics, the University of Edinburgh. The Turing Research Symposium was organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics in partnership with SICSA and supported by Cambridge University Press.

Professor David Harel works in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Weizman Institute, Israel. Harel briefly describes three of Turing’s major achievements, in three different fields: computability, biological modeling and artificial intelligence. Interspersed with this, he explains how each of them directly motivated and inspired him to carry out a variety of research projects over a period of 30 years, the results of which can all be viewed humbly as extensions and generalisations of Turing’s pioneering and ingenious insights. The Turing Research Symposium was organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics in partnership with SICSA and supported by Cambridge University Press.

Professor Jamie Davies works in the Physiology department at the University of Edinburgh. Embryologists have classically approached the ideas in Turing’s “The chemical basis of morphogenesis” in two ways: (a) they have modelled embryos in silico to see if Turing patterning could make a particular pattern in principle; and (b) they have sought evidence, from gene expression patterns and knockout phenotypes, for Turing patterning in vivo. We are taking a third approach, effectively a hybrid of the other two and of synthetic biology: we seek to assemble a synthetic Turing patterning system in cultures of living cells. Here, we will present our design, how it behaves in models, and will describe the state of our construction at the time of the meeting. The Turing Research Symposium was organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics in partnership with SICSA and supported by Cambridge University Press.