CfP available on the website of the Society for the Philosophy of Information:
HaPoC Council Meeting
On Tuesday 21 October 2014, the HaPoC Commission Council composed by Liesbeth de Mol, Giuseppe Primiero, Benedikt Loewe, Raymond Turner, Helena Durnova and gerard Alberts met in London. This was our annual Council meeting.
The discussion was focused on the present and the future of HaPoC, and its activities. In particular, the Council has considered:
– the current structure of HaPoC and the engagement of its members;
– the forthcoming Third Conference on the History and Philosophy of Computing (stay tuned for more news soon!);
– the financial and administrative status of the Commission;
– the organization of other forthcoming events (again, be alert!);
– the possibilities of new activities and our publications plans.
The future of the HaPoC Commission is in all its members and the Council hopes to engage you more in leading the activities that are being planned. You will hear from us soon again with details of all the topics discussed in London!
Walter Isaacson on the women of ENIAC
An excerpt from the book The Innovators by Walter Isaacson on the women who programmed ENIAC.
http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/
CFP: Workshop on Logic and Information (5th UNILOG)
Workshop at the Fifth World Conference on Universal Logic
25-30 June 2015
University of Istanbul
http://www.socphilinfo.org/news/cfp/469-workshop-logic-and-information-5th-unilog
In this workshop we want to approach the relation between logic and information from the perspective of the philosophy of information, as well as from a logical perspective, and draw attention to a number of questions that have historically received attention, or have only been individuated in recent years. These include the possibility of a genuine informational conception of logical consequence, the relation between informational and computational approaches, the relation between information and logics of questions, and the difference between (what van Benthem calls) implicit informational stances in logic like that of intuitionist logic and explicit stances like that of epistemic logic.
Keynote speaker
Luciano Floridi (OII, Oxford University)
Call for abstracts
Extended abstracts (1000-1500 words) should be sent via e-mail before November 15th 2014 to: workshop@logicandinformation.be
Organisers
The workshop is hosted by Universal Logic 2015 and organised in collaboration with the Society for the Philosophy of Information.
Workshop chairs are: Patrick Allo and Giuseppe Primiero
Workshop on Philosophy of Computer Science
This workshop is co-located with the 5th Universal Logic and organized by Petros Stefaneas (National Technical University of Athens, Greece) and Nicola Angius (University of Sassari, Italy). Deadline for extended abstracts submission is November 15th, 2014.
CiE15 HaPoC Special Session
HaPoC is organising a new Special Session on History and Philosophy of Computing at the CiE2015 Evolving Computability Conference, to be held in Bucharest, Romania from June 29th to July 3rd. This new event will be organised by Marco Benini (University of Insubria) and Christine Proust (CNRS & Université Paris Diderot). The community is very grateful for their help in setting up this new Special Session and we are looking forward for a new exciting programme!
On Software Intensive Science
Among the most discussed issues of the research area of philosophy of computing these days are certainly the nature, methodology and experimental characteristics of Software Intensive Science. A recent article in Philosophy & Technology by John Symons, Jack Horner has explicitly approached SIS, available here:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-014-0163-x
The article is followed by two short comment papers, by Nicola Angius here
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-014-0173-8
and by Giuseppe Primiero, here
A Wider Scope of Inquiry
When I was a programmer, and even when I was a teacher of programming, I would wonder about where data structures and algorithms came from, and to what extent people use pass-by-value, pass-by-reference, and pass-by-name for communication in daily life, and whether we use those techniques for activities besides communication, and whether the universe somehow uses those techniques, and about many other speculative questions. Now those questions attract me to the philosophy of computer science. But the phenomena yielded by computing don’t seem to be commonly studied as philosophical subjects. Most inquiry is embedded in, and therefore directed by, the computational model, applying symbols, inductive definitions, and set-theoretic operations to philosophical questions about computing. I propose turning this inside out, identifying the significant artifacts of computer science and giving them philosophical treatment in their own right, outside of the digital realm.
In this spirit, I offered a contribution during the HaPoC symposium at IACAP 2014, applying questions of ontology to the algorithm. What else is possible? See a few ideas at the blog “Teaching the Philosophy of Computer Science,” at http://teachingphilofcs.blogspot.com/, particularly the most recent entry, for June 27, 2014.
Formal models and explanations are important. They give us incomparable insight, foundation, and inspiration. The other approach suggested here should be regarded as complementary. And there must be work out there already that falls into this category, of which I am simply ignorant; members who are conversant with such work are invited to note it here.
Presentation by Gonzalo Genova, HaPoC@IACAP14
The original programme of the HaPoC Symposium at IACAP14 included a talk from Gonzalo Genova (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, España & Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Chile), titled “Intertwining of formal and empirical methods in software engineering”. Unfortunately Gonzalo was not able to attend the meeting, but he sent us a voice over slides presentation of his talk, for which we thank him! The file is available at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/uocbjfyyape2940/HaPoC-Intertwinning-Recorded.wmv
HAPOC Symposium @IACAP
The HaPoC symposium
On July 3, 2014 we organized a symposium during the 29th IACAP conference in sunny Thessaloniki. It was a long but satisfying day with lots of discussion. For the symposium we decided to work around three fundamental questions:
- What are programs, algorithms, machines and how do we understand their
languages? - What is computing/computation?
- What is the science in computer science?
We invited three speakers for each of these questions coming from diverse backgrounds: history, philosophy, computer science, logic and mathematics. One of our speakers, Gonzalo Genova regretfully had to cancel but we will soon post a recording of the talk he prepared for this symposium.
For the first session we had three speakers:
Ray Turner,
Wilfried Sieg and
Robin Hill.
Ray’s talk on the design and construction of computational artefacts reviewed several fundamental issues related to the ontology and epistemology of computational artefacts. Particular attention was given to the dual nature of these technological artefacts, as being both structural and functionally determined. This is a point of view inspired by the Delft school for the philosophy of technology. Wilfried Sieg, with his reflective talk on the notion of computation, went back to the historically developed notion of computability as we find it in the work of Church, Post and Turing. However, rather than entering into the existing discussions on Church’s thesis he focuses instead on general aspects of computability. These can be expressed by “axioms” for an appropriate abstract concept and a representation theorem can be established. The abstract concept is that of a computable dynamical system ; the representation theorem states that the computations of any model of the axioms can be simulated by a Turing machine. The axioms arise naturally out of a suitable generalization of the Post-Turing-Gandy developments (and not out of the Herbrand-Gödel-Kleene tradition).
Finally, Robin Hill gave a thought-provoking talk on the notion of algorithms by presenting a definition of algorithms which derives from practice rather than from theory.
During the second session,
Barry Cooper,
Nachum Derschowitz and Mate Szabo, each contributed to the fundamental question as what computation is. Despite some initial technological problems with the beamer, Barry was able to give a talk with the thought-provoking title Computing the Rainbow. Several different notions of computation were reviewed and an anti-reductionist view on the natural world, inspired by higher-type computability, was proposed. Computation is linked to embodiment and language is understood as something which reflects and maybe encompasses this structuring of the natural world into types. Nachum Derschowitz shared his views on concurrent computing in quite a dynamical and visually entertaining talk. In a vain similar to Sieg’s way of working, Nachum derives several general characteristics of concurrent computing in order to propose a model that fits into the rich research programme on unconventional models of computing. Finally, Mate Szabo highlighted the work of Emil Post by relating it to Turing’s work. He reviewed how Post in fact anticipated some of the more well-known 30s results and how, on this basis, he proposed some particular views on Turing’s thesis.
During the final session,
Ksenia Tatarchenko and
Simone Martini each offered their reflections on the computer science discipline.
Ksenia focused on two important conference in the history of computer science: the Los Alamos meeting on the history of computing organized by Metropolis and an international gathering in Urgench, Uzbekistan organized by Knuth and Ershov. Both conferences highlight how against the background of the Cold War, computer scientists from both sides of the so-called iron curtain were in fact capable of exchanging ideas, thus contributing to the formation of computer science as an international endeavor. Simone proposed a language-oriented view on computer science, proposing programming languages as the defining modelling language of computer science, with important connections to translation and abstraction levels.
We really think this was a very exciting, high-level and thought provoking meeting which, to us, shows that it is possible to bridge the gap between practitioners, historians and philosophers. Of course, the main questions “what is computing” will not have one answer, but this is exactly what allows for the richness of thought in the history and philosophy of computing.
We end this post with some open questions that came up during the discussion:
– How do we bridge the gap between the practice of computation and theoretical developments?
– Can we derive a notion of computation that encompasses both the historically fluctuating notion of computation as well as the theoretical models that we have?
– What is the ontological status of a program? Is it a technological artefact?
– How can we bridge the gap between history and philosophy of computing as conducted by professional historians and philosophers and the actual practice? And what is the best way to organize the discussion around this issue?
– Why did digital computers dominate analog computers since the late 40s and are we in need to revise this, given recent advances in natural computing?
– What is the difference in the relation between different programming languages and programming languages and machine language?