Professor Philip Maini works in the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Oxford. Turing’s seminal paper “The chemical basis of morphogenesis”, published in 1952, proposed that pattern formation in early embryonic development was an emergent, or self-organising, phenomenon driven by diffusion. This ingeneous and highly counter-intuitive idea has formed the basis for an enormous number of subsequent studies from both experimental and theoretical viewpoints. Maini critiques...

Professor Maja Pantic is Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing at Imperial College London. A widely-accepted prediction is that computing will move to the background, weaving itself into the fabric of our everyday living spaces and projecting the human user into the foreground. To realise this prediction, next-generation computing should develop anticipatory user interfaces that are human-centered, built for humans, and based on naturally occurring multimodal human behaviour such...

Professor Barbara Grosz works in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, USA. In 1950, when Turing proposed to replace the question “Can machines think?” with the question “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”, computer science was not yet a field of study, Shannon’s theory of information had just begun to change the way people thought about communication, and psychology was only starting to look beyond Behaviorism....

Professor Jim Al-Khalili is Professor of Physics and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey. From cryptanalysis and the cracking of the German Enigma Code during the Second World War to his work on artificial intelligence, Alan Turing was without doubt one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. An extraordinarily gifted mathematician, he is rightly regarded as the father of computer science having set in place the formal rules that govern the way every...

Professor Steve Furber works in the School of Computer Science at Manchester University. 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...

The Turing Research Symposium Lecture 2 by Dr Elham Kashefi: Quantum Turing Test. A fundamental goal in quantum information processing is to test a machine’s (or more generally nature’s) ability to exhibit quantum behaviour. The most celebrated result in this domain, which has been also demonstrated experimentally, is the celebrated Bell Theorem that verifies the non-local nature of quantum mechanics. Could we generalise such approaches to verify that a given device is in fact taking...

Professor David Harel works in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Weizman Institute, Israel. Harel briefly describes three of Turing’s major achievements, in three different fields: computability, biological modeling and artificial intelligence. Interspersed with this, he explains how each of them directly motivated and inspired him to carry out a variety of research projects over a period of 30 years, the results of which can all be viewed humbly as extensions and...

Professor Jamie Davies works in the Physiology department at the University of Edinburgh. Embryologists have classically approached the ideas in Turing’s “The chemical basis of morphogenesis” in two ways: (a) they have modelled embryos in silico to see if Turing patterning could make a particular pattern in principle; and (b) they have sought evidence, from gene expression patterns and knockout phenotypes, for Turing patterning in vivo. We are taking a third approach, effectively a hybrid...