"Computers are Not Omnipotent"

Centre de Recherche en Informatique de l'Université Paris 1 
Pantheon-Sorbonne has the honor of inviting you to the talk of

*David Harel*: *"Computers are Not Omnipotent"*

*Monday, 2 February 2015, 10h, **
**Address:  Centre Pantheon (12, place du Pantheon), Salle 1.*
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To register for the talk, please, send an *e-mail with subject [Talk 
Harel]* to irina.rychkova@univ-paris1.fr

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*Abstract*:
In 1984, TIME magazine quoted the chief editor of a certain software 
publication as saying:

"Put the right kind of software into a computer, and it will do whatever 
you want it to. There may be limits on what you can do with the machines 
themselves, but there are no limits on what you can do with software."

This talk will survey results obtained over the last 80 years by 
mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists, which disprove this 
ignorance-based statement in a sweeping and fundamental way. We shall 
discuss problems that are provably non-computable, as well as ones that 
are hopelessly time- or memory-consuming (requiring far more time than 
has elapsed since the Big Bang, or requiring a computer would not fit 
into the entire known universe). Time permitting, we will also take a 
somewhat more amusing look at these facts, and relate them to the 
(im)possibilities of true artificial intelligence. The topic is very 
closely linked to some of Alan M. Turing's most important work.
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*Short BIO of the speaker:*
David Harel is a pioneer in the field of computer science. During his 
academic career, he worked in several areas of computer science, 
including computability, logics of programs, automata theory., software 
and systems engineering, object-oriented analysis and design and visual 
languages.

Over the past 30 years Harel made a number of contributions bridging the 
gap between informal system descriptions and executable programs. He is 
widely known as an inventor of statecharts -- a visual modeling language 
for complex discrete event systems. He is also a co-inventor of live 
sequence charts (LSCs), the idea of reactive animation (2002) and 
behavioral programming (2010)  - the fast growing area of computer science.

David received a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
(MIT) in 1978. He is an author of more then 250 scientific publications, 
including 10 books. Since 1980 he has worked at the Weizmann Institute 
of Science in Rehovot, Israel, where he held the positions of department 
head and dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science.

His awards include the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (1992), 
the Stevens Award in Software Development Methods (1996), the Israel 
Prize (2004), the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (2006), the ACM 
Software System Award (2007), the ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award (2008), 
the Emet Prize (2010) and the ABZ Platinum Gold Medal from ETH Zurich 
(2013).
He has received honorary degrees from the University of Rennes (2005), 
the Open University of Israel (2006), the University of Milano-Bicocca 
(2007), the Technical University of Eindhoven (2012) and Bet Berl 
College (2014). He is a Fellow of the ACM (1994), the IEEE (1995), and 
the AAAS (2007), and is a member of the Academia Europaea (2006), the 
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2010), the US National 
Academy of Engineering (2014), and the American Academy of Arts and 
Sciences (2014).