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Distinguished Lecturer Series

The Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences has been inviting influential computer science researchers and faculty to UMass Amherst since 1989, encouraging thought-provoking conversations and broadening educational opportunities for our students and community. 

All lectures are free and open to the public.

2023

September 15, 2023
Raymond J. Mooney (University of Texas at Austin)
"Answering Why Questions about Narrative Text"

October 25, 2023
Susan Murphy (Harvard University)
"We Used Reinforcement Learning, but Did It Work?"

November 1, 2023
Kwabena Boahen (Stanford University)
"Dendrocentric Learning for Synthetic Intelligence"

2022

October 12, 2022
Juliana Freire (NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Director of the VIDA Center)
"Usability, Transparency, and Trust for Data-Intensive Computations"

November 9, 2022
Anupam Gupta (Carnegie Mellon University)
"Algorithm Analysis Beyond the Worst-Case"

POSTPONED
Nenad Medvidovic (University of Southern California)
"Software Archipelagos Considered Harmful"

2020-2021

October 28, 2020  
Dr. Adnan Darwiche (University of California, Los Angeles) 
"
Three Modern Roles for Logic in AI"

November 4, 2020
Jeanette Wing (Columbia University) 
"Data for Good: Ensuring the Responsible Use of Data to Benefit Society"

2019-2020

September 18, 2019
Stefan Savage (University California, San Diego)
"Modern Automotive Vulnerabilities: Problems, Causes and Outcomes"

October 7, 2019
Ayanna Howard (Georgia Tech)
"Designing Socially Interactive Robots for Healthcare"

January 23, 2020
Sheelagh Carpendale (Simon Fraser University)
"Visualization for Data Empowerment"

January 27, 2020
Gregory Abowd (Georgia Institute of Technology)
"Making Materials that are Computational"

February 3, 2020
Neeraj Suri (Lancaster University)
"Consistency in a Cloudy World"

2018-2019

October 30, 2018
Lance Fortnow (Georgia Tech)
"Computer Science in 6/10ths of a Second"

November 29, 2018
Guang-Zhong Yang (Imperial College London)
"The Body You Know"

2017-2018 

October 18, 2017
Nick Feamster (Princeton University)
"Who Will Control Speech Online?"

[YouTube Video]

November 8, 2017
Muriel Medard (MIT)
"Network coding - a personal account of combining theory and practice"

[YouTube Video]

November 16, 2017
Ronitt Rubinfeld (MIT)
"Local Computation Algorithms"

[YouTube Video]

April 5, 2018 
Moshe Y. Vardi (Rice University) 
"The Automated-Reasoning Revolution: From Theory to Practice and Back"

2016-2017

October 17, 2016
Venkatesan Guruswami (Carnegie Mellon University)
"Progress in Error-Correction: New Codes for Old Noise Models"

[YouTube Video]

October 26, 2016
Dieter Fox (University of Washington)
"Toward Robots that Understand People and their Environment"

[YouTube Video]

November 4, 2016
Avi Wigderson (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
"Randomness"

[YouTube Video]

November 10, 2016
Daniel Jackson (MIT)
"Towards a Theory of Software Design"

[YouTube Video]

November 16, 2016
Robert Calderbank (Duke)
"Codes for Data Storage"

[YouTube Video]

Distinguished Lecturer Series Archive