Algorithms Leader Richard Karp to Speak at Turing Award Centenaries

Richard Karp, Leader of ICSI's Algorithms GroupApril 2, 2012
Professor Richard Karp, leader of the Algorithms Group, has been invited to speak at three conferences celebrating the 100th birthday of the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. Karp received the Turing Award in 1985 for his contributions to the theory of computational algorithms. The Turing Award is the most prestigious technical award given by the ACM and widely considered the most prestigious award in computing.

At two conferences in May, Karp will give a lecture on how the theory of computation is applied to scientific and technological fields, such as physics, molecular biology, and economics. He will also discuss the need for computational theory to be used in conjunction with the fields of massive data and combinatorial optimization in order to be applied effectively to the sciences. Karp will give the lecture at the Turing Centennial Celebration at Princeton University and at the Annual Conference on Theory and Applications of Models of Computation in Beijing, China. Read the abstract of his talk here > >

In June, Karp will participate in a panel discussion on an algorithmic view of the universe at the ACM A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration in San Francisco.

Karp is a professor of UC Berkeley's Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, with additional appointments in the Mathematics, Bioengineering, and Operations Research Departments. He has been affiliated with ICSI since its founding in 1988 and has led the Algorithms Group for the majority of the time since then. He has performed foundational work in computational complexity and, as noted in ACM's Turing Award citation of Karp, introduced the "now standard methodology for proving problems to be computationally difficult." Over the years, his work has focused on algorithmic answers to biological problems, heuristic algorithms, and problems related to machine learning. In addition to the Turing Award, he has received the Kyoto Prize, which is sometimes described as the Japanese Nobel, and the U.S. National Medal of Science and is a member of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering.