We are happy to announce that the IACAP 2017 Covey Award will go to Ray Turner, one of the HAPOC council members and we congratulate Ray with this well-deserved recognition of his work on the philosophy of computer science. See the announcement below for more details.
The International Association for Computing and Philosophy’s Covey Award
recognizes senior scholars with a substantial record of innovative
research in the field of computing and philosophy broadly conceived.
IACAP’s Executive Board is delighted to announce that Professor Raymond
Turner will be presented with the Covey Award at IACAP 2017, June 26-28,
Stanford University, where he will present the Covey Award Keynote
Address.
Professor Turner is Professor Emeritus of Logic and Computation in the
School of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University
of Essex, where he has served since 1985. Holding doctorates in
Mathematical Logic and Theoretical Computer Science (Queen Mary College,
London, 1973) and Philosophy (Bedford College, London, 1981). Professor
Turner has also been a Sloan Research Fellow at the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst (1982) and CSLI, Stanford University (1984). He
was Visiting Professor and Research Fellow at the University of
Texas-Austin (1984 and 1987) and Senior Research Fellow at the
University of Massachusetts-Amherst (1984 and 1986). Currently he serves
on the editorial board of the Journal of Logic and Computation and, for
the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, as Editor of Logic and
Computation.
Professor Turner’s work in Theoretical Computing Science and the
Philosophy of Computer Science has been field-defining and
ground-breaking. His books include Computable Models (Springer 2010),
Constructive Foundations for Functional Languages (McGraw Hill 1991),
Truth and Modality for Knowledge Representation (MIT Press 1990), and
Logics for Artificial Intelligence (Pitman, 1984). His publications
include “A Theory of Properties”, (Journal of Symbolic Logic, 1987),
“The Foundations of Specification” (Journal of Logic and Computation,
2005), “Type Inference for Set Theory” (Theoretical Computer Science,
2001), “Specification”, (Minds and Machines, 2011), “Programming
Languages as Technical Artefacts”, (Philosophy and Technology, 2014),
“Logics of Truth” (Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 1990), and “The
Philosophy of Computer Science”, (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy,
2013).
As Professor Turner describes his research,
The philosophy of computer science is concerned with those
philosophical issues that arise from within the academic
discipline of computer science. It is intended to be the
philosophical endeavour that stands to computer science as
philosophy of mathematics does to mathematics and philosophy of
technology does to technology. Indeed, the abstract nature of
computer science, coupled with its technological ambitions,
ensures that many of the conceptual questions that arise in the
philosophies of mathematics and technology have computational
analogues. In addition, the subject will draw in variants of
some of the central questions in the philosophies of mind,
language and science.
In contrast, I take the central task of Theoretical Computing
Science to be the construction of mathematical models of
computational phenomena. Such models provide us with a deeper
understanding of the nature of computation and representation.
For example, the early work on computability theory provided a
mathematical model of computation itself. Turing’s work is of
fundamental importance here. Adapting Gödel’s diagonalization
argument, he demonstrated that there are problems that do not
admit of an algorithmic solution. He thus provided a
mathematical model of computation that displayed its
limitations. Later work on the semantics of programming
languages enabled a precise articulation of the underlying
differences between programming languages and led to a clearer
understanding of the distinction between semantic representation
and implementation. Early work in complexity theory supplied us
with abstract notions which formally articulated informal ideas
about the resources used during computation. I take this model
building endeavour to be the central and fundamental role of
theoretical computer science.
Please join us at IACAP 2017, June 26-28, Stanford University to
congratulate Professor Turner on this well-deserved award.
http://www.iacap.org/iacap-2017/
Best,
Don Berkich
IACAP President