ACM Turing Centenary events

ACM Turing Centenary events
Name	ACM Turing Centenary events
Caption	Events commemorating Alan Turing's centenary
Date	2012
Location	International
Organizer	Association for Computing Machinery

ACM Turing Centenary events were a series of international conferences, symposia, workshops, lectures, and exhibitions held in 2012 to mark the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing's birth, bringing together scholars, practitioners, and institutions across computing and allied fields. The program connected historical perspectives and contemporary advances through collaborations among societies, universities, museums, and companies, and influenced subsequent activities at major venues and organizations. The centenary created linkages between figures and entities spanning computer science, mathematics, cryptanalysis, cognitive science, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and engineering.

Background and significance

The centenary build-up involved institutions such as the Association for Computing Machinery, British Computer Society, Royal Society, IEEE, University of Manchester, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, King's College London, and Bletchley Park coordinating honors for Alan Turing alongside recognition from cultural institutions like the Science Museum, London, National Museum of Computing, Tate Modern, Royal Institution, and Victoria and Albert Museum. Funders and supporters included Wellcome Trust, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, European Research Council, National Science Foundation, and Gates Foundation, while academic partners ranged from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University to University of Oxford and Imperial College London. The commemoration intersected with awards and prizes such as the Turing Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Royal Medal, and the Order of the British Empire, and resonated with legacies of figures like Alonzo Church, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Stephen Hawking, and John Nash.

List of centenary events

Major public and scholarly events included an international lecture series at King's College London and Bletchley Park Lecture Series, symposia at Princeton University and University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, workshops at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a retrospective exhibition at the Science Museum, London, film screenings at British Film Institute, and panel sessions at Royal Society and Royal Institution. Conferences spanned specialized venues such as the International Conference on Functional Programming, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the Principles of Programming Languages workshops, the Symposium on Theory of Computing, and public events at Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Additional gatherings took place at institutions including National Museum of Computing, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, École Polytechnique, ETH Zurich, University of Tokyo, Seoul National University, Australian National University, University of Toronto, McGill University, University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Washington, Microsoft Research, Google, IBM Research, Apple Inc., Facebook, Amazon (company), Intel Corporation, and Nokia.

Organizers and sponsors

Primary organizers included the Association for Computing Machinery, British Computer Society, University of Manchester, King's College London, Science Museum, London, National Museum of Computing, and Bletchley Park Trust, with sponsorship from Google, Microsoft Research, IBM, Intel Corporation, Facebook, Amazon (company), ARM Holdings, Royal Society, Wellcome Trust, EPSRC, European Research Council, National Science Foundation, Alan Turing Institute, Turing Trust, and corporate donors such as Accenture, Siemens, SAP, Cisco Systems, Oracle Corporation, Nokia, BT Group, and Telefonica. University contributors included University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Imperial College London, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton University, Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, University of Edinburgh, and University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.

Notable talks and participants

Speakers and participants spanned disciplines and institutions: leading computer scientists and mathematicians such as Donald Knuth, Edsger W. Dijkstra, Leslie Lamport, Barbara Liskov, Michael O. Rabin, Dana Scott, Stephen Wolfram, Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Andrew Wiles, Roger Penrose, Ian Goodfellow, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, Nick Bostrom, Susan Blackmore, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Peter Norvig, Judea Pearl, Cynthia Dwork, Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman, Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, Susan Stepney, Maja Pantic, Stuart Russell, Wolfram Research representatives, and historians and biographers including Andrew Hodges, Jack Good, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Sara Turing advocates, and curators from Science Museum, London and National Museum of Computing. Panels featured technologists from Google, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, Facebook, and Amazon (company), academic chairs from MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, Oxford, and policy voices from UK Parliament, European Commission, UNESCO, OECD, and Wellcome Trust.

Publications and recordings

Conference proceedings and edited volumes were published by ACM Press, Springer, IEEE Press, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, MIT Press, Prentice Hall, Elsevier, and Routledge, while documentary films and recordings were produced by BBC, British Film Institute, PBS, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, NOVA, and NHK. Multimedia archives were hosted by ACM Digital Library, arXiv, IEEE Xplore, JSTOR, ScienceDirect, YouTube, Vimeo, and institutional repositories at University of Cambridge, University of Manchester, MIT OpenCourseWare, and Stanford Online. Biographical and historical essays appeared in journals including Communications of the ACM, Nature, Science, The Lancet, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, History of Science Society publications, and edited collections from Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.

Legacy and impact

The centenary stimulated creation and expansion of institutes and initiatives such as the Alan Turing Institute, the Turing Trust, endowed chairs at King's College London and University of Manchester, curricular developments at MIT, Stanford University, and Carnegie Mellon University, and public exhibits at Science Museum, London and National Museum of Computing. Policy dialogues influenced programs at European Commission and UK Research and Innovation, while industry collaborations fostered research partnerships with Google DeepMind, OpenAI, IBM Watson, Microsoft Research, Facebook AI Research, and startups incubated by Y Combinator, Techstars, 500 Startups, and Entrepreneur First. The centenary revived scholarship on figures like Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Ada Lovelace, Alfred North Whitehead, Kurt Gödel, Emil Post, Hugh Everett III, and George Boole, and reinforced public recognition through media coverage by BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Times, and The Economist.

Category:Alan Turing