Moshe Vardi (Rice University): Distinguished Speaker Series

Part of the 2025 Distinguished Speaker Series.

The University of Chicago Data Science Institute, Department of Statistics, Department of Computer Science, and Committee on Computational and Applied Mathematics are proud to announce our 2025 Distinguished Speaker Series. Join us for stimulating talks from leading data science researchers exploring and expanding the fundamental methods and approaches that transform large and complex datasets into knowledge and action.

Events will take place in the John Crerar Library Building, Room 390, with a lunch social starting at noon before the lecture at 12:30 p.m (unless otherwise noted).

Abstract: In both computer science and economics, efficiency is a cherished property. The field of algorithms is almost solely focused on their efficiency. The goal of AI research is to increase efficiency by reducing human labor.  In economics, the main advantage of the free market is that it promises “economic efficiency”. A major lesson from many recent disasters is that these fields have over-emphasized efficiency and under-emphasized resilience. I argue that resilience is a more important property than efficiency and discuss how the two fields can broaden their
focus to make resilience a primary consideration.  I will conclude by raising serious questions on the goal of the AI research program.

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 the Communications of the ACM, after having served for a decade as Editor-in-Chief.