Colloquium Details
How to be an ethical computer scientist
Speaker: Moshe Vardi, Rice University
Location: 60 Fifth Avenue 150
Date: February 10, 2023, 11 a.m.
Host: Julia Stoyanovich
Synopsis:
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 talk the speaker will discuss how computer scientists should behave ethically.
Speaker Bio:
Moshe Y. Vardi is University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. He is the recipient of several awards, including the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Knuth Prize, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, and the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award. He is the author and co-author of over 750 papers, as well as two books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow as well as fellow of several societies, and a member of several academies, including the US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Science. He holds seven honorary doctorates. He is a Senior Editor of the Communications of the ACM, the premier publication in computing.
Notes:
In-person attendance only available to those with active NYU ID cards.