The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

How does the brain beget the mind? How do molecules, cells and synapses effect reasoning, intelligence, language, science? Despite dazzling progress in experimental neuroscience we do not seem to be making progress in the overarching question -- the gap is huge and a completely new approach seems to be required. As Richard Axel recently put it: "We don't have a logic for the transformation of neural activity into thought." What kind of formal system would qualify as this "logic"? In this talk I will propose an answer. (Joint work with Santosh Vempala, Dan Mitropolsky, Mike Collins, and Larry Abbott.) Short Bio: Christos Papadimitriou is currently the Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Before that he taught at UC Berkeley for 20 years, and earlier he taught at Harvard, MIT, the National Technical University of Athens, Stanford, and UC San Diego. Papadimitriou has been awarded the Knuth Prize, IEEE’s John von Neumann Medal, the EATCS Award, the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award, and the Gödel Prize. He is a fellow of the Association for Computer Machinery and the National Academy of Engineering, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. This year Papadimitriou is the recipient of the prestigious Harvey Prize. Papadimitriou received his BS in Electrical Engineering from Athens Polytechnic in 1972. He has a MS in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from Princeton, received in 1974 and 1976, respectively. =============================== Refreshments will be served from 10:45 Lecture starts at 11:00