On June 15th, 2020, Professor Manuel Blum, Bruce Nelson Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Turing Award Winner (1995), and Professor Lenore Blum, Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie Mellon University co-presented a lecture titled "Towards a Conscious AI: A Computer Architecture inspired by Neuroscience" remotely. Professor Xiaotie Deng from CFCS hosted the lecture. Nearly 1,000 audience watched the lecture online.

Abstract
Thanks to major advances in cognitive neuroscience, we are on the brink of a scientific understanding of how the brain achieves consciousness.  This talk will describe neuroscientist Bernard Baars' Global Workspace Model (GWM) of the brain, its implications for understanding consciousness, and a novel computer architecture that it inspires.   

A major contribution of this talk lies in the precise formal model of Conscious Turing Machine (CTM) also called Conscious AI (CAI).

This is joint work of Manuel, Lenore and Avrim Blum.

Biography
Manuel Blum, the Bruce Nelson University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, is a pioneer in the field of theoretical computer science and the winner of the 1995 Turing Award in recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its applications to cryptography and program checking, a mathematical approach to writing programs that check their work.

Lenore Blum, the Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, is known for her contributions to the theory of real number computation, for her invention of a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator, and for her efforts to increase the diversity of mathematics and computer science.