Peking University, May 17, 2012： On the afternoon of May 15, at the invitation of Office of International Relations and Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Turing Prize winner John Hopcroft presented his report titled Build a Scientific foundation for Information Age at Tan Siu Lin Center for International Studies. John Hopcroft was here at PKU for FAW-AAIM 2012 International Algorithm Meeting, and his speech started “Information Technology and Informatization” Expert Forum. Students and teachers from EECS (School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science) as well as representatives from other countries attended the lecture.

Professor John Hopcroft

Professor John Hopcroft pointed out that Information Age was a revolutionary era that would change our lives in every aspect. Only by adapting to these changes can individuals, companies and countries anticipate a better future. Information technology has new focus in the time to come, which results from the combination of computing and telecommunication. In order to support and push forward IT development, new theories first need to be built up. 

Academician Mei Hong and John Hopcroft

In the end of the lecture, academician Mei Hong presented a gift for John Hopcroft prepared by Office of International Relations and EECS. The lecture ended in the warm response from the audience.

Extended Reading:

Wikipedia: The Turing Prize or Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field". The Turing Award is recognized as the "highest distinction in Computer science" and "Nobel Prize of computing".

Written by: Shi Hui
Edited by: Yan Binghan
Source: PKU News (Chinese)