Hybrid Event

We’ll live-stream via Zoom. Join us from all over the world!

Program

TU Wien Informatics will be welcoming Carla P. Gomes, AI expert and founder of the emerging field of computational sustainability, for the Gödel Lecture 2023. She will delve into the challenges and possibilities to create a sustainable future with AI.

This year, the Vienna Gödel Lecture is part of our “AI+Logic Week”, where we invite internationally renowned scientist in the field of AI to delve into technology and its impact on society. Whether you’re a student, a professional looking to expand your knowledge, or a citizen interested in the societal implications of AI – this week’s lectures will provide you with valuable insights and perspectives.

Opening and Moderation

• Stefan Szeider, Professor and Head of the Research Unit Algorithms and Complexity at TU Wien Informatics, Head of the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms (VCLA)

Welcome Address

• Johannes Fröhlich, Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation
• Gerti Kappel, Dean of TU Wien Informatics

Vienna Gödel Lecture: “AI for Scientific Discovery and a Sustainable Future”

• Carla P. Gomes, Nielsen Professor of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University, director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability, and co-director of the Cornell University AI for Science Institute.

Get-together

Join us for drinks, refreshments, and networking after the lecture.

Talk

AI for Scientific Discovery and a Sustainable Future

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly progressing field, achieving remarkable milestones ranging from computer vision and machine translation to world-champion level Go gameplay, self-driving cars, and Chat-GPT. The ever-growing AI capabilities unlock promising opportunities for progress in various domains. In this talk, Gomes will discuss AI research devoted to fostering scientific discoveries for a sustainable future.

Specifically, she will address efforts of the new interdisciplinary field of Computational Sustainability, which aims to develop computational models and methods that enable a balance between environmental, economic, and societal needs.

She will present examples of computational sustainability challenges, encompassing biodiversity conservation, strategic planning of hydropower dams in the Amazon basin, and the discovery of renewable energy materials. She will highlight the cross-computational themes and challenges that AI poses, underscoring the potential for groundbreaking advancements in pursuing a sustainable future.

About Carla P. Gomes

Carla P. Gomes is an exceptional figure in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Sustainability. She is the Ronald C. and Antonia V. Nielsen Professor of Computing and Information Science, the director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University, and co-director of the Cornell University AI for Science Institute.

With a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh, Gomes has dedicated her career to the pursuit of knowledge in artificial intelligence, particularly in large-scale constraint reasoning, optimization, and machine learning. Her research has had a profound impact on various areas of science.

Gomes has become deeply immersed in research on scientific discovery for a sustainable future and, more generally, in research in the new field of Computational Sustainability. For pioneering this new field and her transformative contributions to AI, she was honored with the Feigenbaum Prize by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 2021. Computational Sustainability aims to develop computational methods to help solve some of the key environmental, economic, and societal challenges to help put us on a path toward a sustainable future. Gomes’s passion lies in leveraging the power of computational methods to address critical environmental, economic, and social challenges.

Gomes’s groundbreaking work has been widely recognized and admired. She has (co-)authored over 200 publications, including influential papers in prestigious journals like Nature and Science. She was the lead PI of two NSF Expeditions in Computing awards. Her research has garnered numerous accolades, including several best paper awards and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award, for contributions to bridging computer science and other disciplines in 2022. Additionally, she was named the “most influential Cornell professor” by a Merrill Presidential Scholar (2020).

Gomes is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

About Vienna Gödel Lectures

Named after the famous Austrian-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) and introduced in 2013, the annual Vienna Gödel Lectures bring world-class scientists to Vienna. The lecture series illustrates computer science’s fundamental and disruptive contribution to our information society, and it investigates how our discipline explains and shapes the world we live in—and thereby, our lives as such.

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