Please join us for the 2025 Wheeler Lecture on 'Efficiency, Resilience, and Artificial Intelligence' at 15:00 (BST) on Wednesday 22 October.
Our speaker is Prof Moshe Vardi, University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. This lecture will also be livestreamed.
Abstract:
In both computer science and economics, efficiency is a cherished property. The field of algorithms is almost solely focused on their efficiency. The goal of AI research is to increase efficiency by reducing human labor. In economics, the main advantage of the free market is that it promises 'economic efficiency'. A major lesson from many recent disasters is that both fields have over-emphasized efficiency and under-emphasized resilience. I argue that resilience is a more important property than efficiency and discuss how the two fields can broaden their focus to make resilience a primary consideration. I will conclude by raising serious questions on the goal of the AI research program.
Our speaker:
Moshe Y. Vardi is University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, where he is leading an Initiative on Technology, Culture, and Society. His research interests focus on automated reasoning, a branch of Artificial Intelligence with broad applications to computer science, including machine learning, database theory, computational-complexity theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification, and teaching logic across the curriculum.
Prof Vardi is a Fellow of the Royal Society and is the recipient of several awards, including the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Knuth Prize, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, and the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award. He is the author and co-author of over 750 papers, as well as two books, two books: 'Reasoning about Knowledge' and 'Finite Model Theory and Its Applications'.
He is a Guggenheim Fellow as well as fellow of several societies, and a member of several academies, including the US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Science.
For those who can't attend in-person, this lecture will also be livestreamed here.
