Turing Award Winner Manuel Blum will be the speaker of the 2018 Vienna Gödel Lecture of TU Wien Informatics on May 24th. The American mathematician and computer scientist will talk about the design of machines that truly experience joy and pain.

Towards a Conscious AI: A Computer Architecture Inspired by Neuroscience

Thanks to significant advances in neuroscience, we are on the brink of a scientific understanding of how the brain achieves consciousness. Manuel Blum’s talk will describe neuroscientist Bernard Baars’ Global Workspace Model (GWM) of the brain, its implications for understanding consciousness, and a novel computer architecture that it inspires. The Model gives insight for the design of machines that truly experience - as opposed to simulating - the ecstasy of joy and the agony of pain. It also provides a reasonable explanation of free will in a completely deterministic world. This research is joint work with Lenore Blum.

About Manuel Blum

Manuel Blum is the Bruce Nelson University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a pioneer in the field of theoretical computer science. He is the winner of the 1995 Turing Award in recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking. Blum began his academic career at MIT in 1966 and accepted his current position at Carnegie Mellon in 2001.

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