College of Science & Engineering

Building Brains
School of Computing Science
Date: Friday, October 19 2012
Time: 16:00 - 17:00
Venue: Bute Hall, University of Glasgow
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: Professor Steve Furber
Website:www.gla.ac.uk/schools/computing/buildingbrains/

When his concept of the universal computing machine finally became an engineering reality, Alan Turing speculated on the prospects for such machines to emulate human thinking. Although computers now routinely perform impressive feats of logic and analysis, such as searching the vast complexities of the global internet for information in a second or two, they have progressed much more slowly than Turing anticipated towards achieving normal human levels of intelligent behaviour, or perhaps “common sense”. Why is this?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the principles of information processing in the brain are still far from understood. But progress in computer technology means that we can now realistically contemplate building computer models of the brain that can be used to probe these principles much more readily than is feasible, or ethical, with a living biological brain.

Biography

Professor Stephen Byram Furber CBE, FRS, FREng (born 1953 in Manchester, England) is the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering at the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester[2] but is probably best known for his work at Acorn where he was one of the designers of the BBC Micro and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor.

To register your attendance visit: www.gla.ac.uk/schools/computing/buildingbrains/

First published: 21 August 2012