Submitted by Rachel Gardner on Mon, 08/09/2025 - 10:56
'Efficiency, Resilience, and Artificial Intelligence' will be the topic when Prof Moshe Vardi delivers the 2025 Wheeler Lecture on Wednesday 22 October.
Prof Vardi is University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. His lecture, which starts at 15:00 (BST), will also be streamed live for those who are unable to attend in person.
Please register here if you would like to attend.
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.
The Wheeler Lectures
Our annual distinguished lectures are named after David Wheeler, one of the early pioneers of Computer Science.
David worked on the original EDSAC computer and wrote one of the first computer programs to be stored in a computer’s working memory. He pioneered the use of sub-routines and is particularly remembered for his work on data compression.
David was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1981, one of the earliest computer scientists to be so honoured. In October 2003, he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum for his invention of the closed subroutine, his architectural contributions to the ILLIAC, the Cambridge Ring, and computer testing.
