Informatics Inaugural Lecture: Professors Hana Chockler and Laurence Tratt

You're warmly invited to our inaugural lecture event series with speakers Professors Hana Chockler and Laurence Tratt

The Inaugural Lecture Series from the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences (NMES) celebrates the journeys and career successes of our professors, to provide insight and inspiration from the faculty's leading scientists.

Hana and Laurence will present on the ground-breaking research accomplished through their careers. Afterwards, there will be a chance to raise a glass to their achievements over drinks at our reception.

Understanding why: Deciphering opaque outputs of black-box systems

During my whole career I have been interested in why things happen the way they do, at least in computerised systems (I usually have no idea about why things happen in life). Perhaps I am naturally suspicious? My PhD focussed on suspecting and analysing the positive answer of a model-checking procedure - apparently, the fact that it is a precise mathematical algorithm was not enough. Then I discovered causal reasoning and have been using it ever since.

I argue that understanding why is even more important now than 20 years ago, as the systems become more and more opaque. I will give a brief and informal survey of some areas where understanding why is important, and will (again, briefly and informally) outline how we approach these challenges.

Speaker bio:

Hana Chockler is a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Informatics, King’s College London. Prior to joining King’s in 2013, Professor Chockler worked at IBM Research in the formal verification department. In 2021-22, in parallel with her faculty appointment, she has been working as a Principal Scientist in a start-up company causaLens.

Professor Chockler received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her research interests span a wide variety of topics, including explainable AI, AI for healthcare, formal verification, causal reasoning and its applications, and theoretical concepts related to causality.

Professor Chockler is the King's Principle Investigator in the large-scale research hub Causality in Healthcare AI, whose goal is to bring causal AI to the healthcare domain. She is the author of over 75 published papers and a number of patents, and a frequent keynote speaker in conferences and symposia.

Some things I've learned about software

Software is such a fundamental part of our societal infrastructure that when it goes wrong it can be major news. But what do we really know about software? It is sculpted by our minds more than our hands: we cannot touch it or even really see it. Because of that, we find it hard to understand, let alone speak about, what software is, and how we should go about creating and modifying it.

In this talk, I will try to share what I've learnt so far about software, programs, and programming. What do we know about each? Where are our hopes for each unduly pessimistic or overly optimistic?

Speaker bio:

Laurence Tratt is Professor of Software Development in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London, and is also the Shopify / Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Language Engineering.

His work centres around programming languages, spanning areas from optimisation to measurement to security to flexibility. His research group is known for its open-source contributions, maintaining a number of widely used libraries and utilities.

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