Date: wednesday, 24.05.2017, 15:30
Speaker: prof. Christos H. Papadimitriou
Title: A computer scientist thinks about the brain
Abstract: During the past two decades, computer scientists ventured beyond the study of the computer and its capabilities and limitations, to reach for a computational understanding of the Internet. Arguably, this has transformed computer science (theretofore categorized as applied and mathematical science) into a social science and a natural science. After introductory examples of algorithmic insights into key problems in economics and evolution, I will discuss current work with Wolfgang Maass and Santosh Vempala on models for the creation and interaction of symbolic memories in the brain.
Video
Program
| 24.05.2017 r. | |
| 10:00 | Laying flowers at the monument to the Polish cryptologists |
| 15:00 | Meeting at the faculty profesors' club |
| 15:30 | Christos H. Papadimitriou A computer scientist thinks about the brain |
Speaker
Christos H. Papadimitriou was born and raised in Greece, the son Harilaos and Victoria Papadimitriou, both teachers. He studied Electrical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. In 1973 he immigrated to the United States, chiefly for political reasons. He was awarded a PhD from Princeton in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, under Kenneth Steiglitz, in 1976. He was an Assistant Professor at Harvard between 1976 and 1978, Assistant and then Associate Professor at M.I.T. between 1979 and 1983, Professor at Stanford between 1983 and 1988 (jointly between Computer Science and Operations Research), then Jacobs Professor of Computer Science at UCSD between 1988 and 1995, before joining, in 1996, UC Berkeley, where he is the C. Lester Hogan professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In 1978 he was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley, and between 1982 and 1988 he held a professorship at the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece.
Papadimitriou has written and co-authored five technical books, including the textbook Algorithms and the graduate textbooks Combinatorial Optimization (with Kenneth Steiglitz) and Computational Complexity, as well as over 400 research papers on the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its applications in computer systems, databases, control systems, artificial intelligence and robotics, networks and the Internet, economics and game theory, biology and evolution, and the brain.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and an ACM Fellow. He was awarded the Knuth Prize in 2002, the Goedel Prize in 2012, the EATCS Award in 2015, the IEEE von Neumann medal in 2016, and doctorates honoris causa from ETH (Zurich), the University of Macedonia, the University of Athens, the University of Patras, the University of Cyprus, the National Technical University of Athens, EPFL (Lausanne), and the University of Paris-Dauphine. In 2014, the president of the Hellenic republic named him commander of the order of the phoenix (a vast promotion from his rank of foot soldier, held under the dictatorship 1972-73).
In addition to his technical work, Papadimitriou has published three novels: Turing (MIT Press 2003), the international best seller Logicomix (Bloomsbury 2010, with A. Doxiadis, [translated to Polish 2011]), and Independence (2013, in Greek), as well as a book of essays in Greek.
