When
Join us for an engaging talk by Roberto Giacobazzi. This event will take place in Social Sciences 224 from 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights and participate in a stimulating discussion!
Title
Creativity, Artificial Languages and the Disappearance of Objects
Abstract
We will trace the path, or part of it, that led to the development of modern information science, commonly known as “computer science.” Starting from the mysticism and Jewish esotericism of the High Middle Ages, passing through mnemonic techniques and the manipulation of symbols, we will arrive at the definition of computable languages and the mathematical notion of creative languages. Interestingly, creativity, understood here in the pure mathematical sense of recursion theory, also represents what we can effectively construct through the manipulation of symbols. In this view, objects are transformed into languages—expressed through code—constituting the foundational elements of contemporary techno-ontology and artificial intelligence.
Bio
Roberto Giacobazzi received his PhD in Computer Science in 1993 from the University of Pisa. From 1993 to 1995, he was a postdoctoral researcher at École Polytechnique, working in the research group of Patrick and Radhia Cousot.
He returned to the University of Pisa in 1995 as an Assistant Professor and, in 1998, moved to the University of Verona as an Associate Professor. From May 2000 to September 2023, he served as Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Verona. During this period, he held several senior leadership roles, including Provost for Education from 2001 to 2004, Provost for Research from 2004 to 2006 and again in 2022, Dean of the College of Science and Technology from 2006 to 2012, and Head of the Department of Computer Science from 2019 to 2021.
From 2016 to 2023, he was Affiliate Faculty at the IMDEA Software Institute in Madrid, Spain, where he held a Cátedra de Excelencia from the Comunidad de Madrid, awarded in 2017. In October 2023, he joined the University of Arizona as Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science.
Professor Giacobazzi’s research interests include abstract interpretation, program analysis and verification, semantics of programming languages, program transformation and optimization, security, computability, the history of computer science, and lattice theory. He is a co-founder of JuliaSoft, now part of GrammaTech Inc. in the United States.
He served as General Chair of the 40th ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2013) and was a member of the POPL steering committee until 2015. He has also served on steering and program committees for major conferences in program analysis and program verification, and has been principal investigator on several international research projects in programming languages.
His honors include the Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovation Foundation Award in 2013, the Facebook Probability and Programming Research Award in 2020, the Amazon Research Award in 2021, and the WhatsApp Research Award on Privacy-Aware Program Analysis in 2022. He has been an ACM Distinguished Member since 2023.