Scientific

We all Google. You may even have found this talk by Googling. What you may not know is that behind the Google’s and other search engines is beautiful and elegant mathematics. In this talk, I will try to explain the workings of page ranking and search engines using only rusty calculus.

An alternative version of this lecture presented at the University of Calgary is also available.

Class:

Scientific

Subject:

Mathematics

Data Structures and Algorithmic Databases

Computer Science

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Alan Turing, the Politics of Sexual Science, and the Making of a Gay Icon

Speaker:

Chris Waters

Date:

Tue, Nov 6, 2012

Location:

University of Calgary

Conference:

Alan Turing Year

Abstract:

In the 1940s Alan Turing’s homosexuality was an open secret amongst his co-workers at Bletchley Park. In 1952 the secret became widely known when Turing was arrested on charges of “gross indecency” under the same 1885 law that had led to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde over half a century earlier. Opting for chemical “treatment” of his “condition” rather than imprisonment, Turing was one of many well-known casualties of a heightened drive against homosexuality in a postwar Britain that drew the line between the normal and the deviant more sharply than ever before. In his talk, Chris Waters will discuss Turing’s sexual proclivities and their meanings in the context of his times, focusing in particular on his arrest and subsequent fate in the context of the sexual politics of the first half of the 1950s. In addition, he will discuss the shaping of Turing’s posthumous reputation, beginning with the attempts made by the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s to render Turing the gay icon he has become today.

Class:

Scientific

Subject:

Computer Science

Turing and Intelligent Machines

Speaker:

Nicole Wyatt

Date:

Tue, Dec 4, 2012

Location:

University of Calgary

Conference:

Alan Turing Year

Abstract:

Turing's interest in the possibility of machine intelligence is probably most familiar in the form of the 'Turing Test', a version of which has been instantiated since 1991 as the Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence. To this date the Loebner Gold Medal has not been won. But should any future winner of the prize count themselves as having created a computer that thinks? Turing's 1950 Mind paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', gives a sustained defence of the claim that a machine able to pass the test, which Turing called the Imitation Game, would indeed qualify as thinking. This lecture will explain the Turing Test as well as Turing's more general views concerning the prospects for artificial intelligence and examine both the criticisms of the test and Turing's rebuttals

Class:

Scientific

Subject:

Mathematics

Computational Complexity

Information Theory and Cryptography

Computer Science