Alan Turing Lecture 2023 given by Professor Byron Cook on Friday, 28th April.

Alan Turing Lecture Title: The Entscheidungsproblem, revisited.

Abstract: While attempting to prove or disprove Hilbert’s 1928 Entscheidungsproblem (“decision problem”) challenge, Frank Ramsey (Kings) proved Ramsey’s theorem, and Alan Turing (Kings) developed the concept of Turing machines. In 2005, both Ramsey and Turing’s work was combined to do something important that we couldn’t do before: reason symbolically about the relationships between future temporal events in complex computer systems. This work has gone on to produce important practical breakthroughs in a variety of areas (e.g. cloud security, transportation safety, biology, etc). This lecture will tell that story. The story will be (largely) aimed at a general audience.

Speaker: Byron Cook is Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL) and VP/Distinguished Scientist at Amazon Web Services. Byron’s interests include computer/network security, program analysis/verification, hardware, operating systems, biological systems, programming languages, theorem proving and logic. Byron is the founder of Amazon’s Automated Reasoning Group (ARG)