Moshe Y. Vardi “How to be an Ethical Computer Scientist”

Lecture + Reception: Wednesday, October 12, 2022 at 4:00 PM Central | Reception to follow

Moshe Y. Vardi, University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University

Talk: How to be an Ethical Computer Scientist

Abstract: Many of us got involved in computing because programming was fun. The advantages of computing seemed intuitive to us. We truly believed that computing yields tremendous societal benefits; for example, the life-saving potential of driverless cars is enormous! Recently, however, computer scientists realized that computing is not a game–it is real–and it brings with it not only societal benefits, but also significant societal costs, such as labor polarization, disinformation, and smart-phone addiction. A common reaction to this crisis is to label it as an “ethics crisis”. But corporations are driven by profits, not ethics, and machines are just machines. Only people can be expected to act ethically. In this Technology, Culture, and Society Lecture, the speaker will discuss how computer scientists should behave ethically.

Bio: Moshe Y. Vardi is a University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. He is the recipient of three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Blaise Pascal Medal, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award, the Southeastern Universities Research Association’s Distinguished Scientist Award, the ACM SIGLOG Church Award, the Knuth Prize, and the ACM Allen Newell Award. He is the author and co-author of over 600 papers, as well as two books: Reasoning about Knowledge and Finite Model Theory and Its Applications. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the European Academy of Science, and Academia Europaea. He holds seven honorary doctorates. He is currently a Senior Editor of of the Communications of the ACM, after having served for a decade as Editor-in-Chief.

Co-Sponsored by: The Ken Kennedy Institute, Rice University Computer Science Department, and Rice Scientia Institute

Registration: Free to attend.

This lecture will be recorded. The recording can be found on the Ken Kennedy Institute YouTube channel.

Host or Publisher The Ken Kennedy Institute