The Della Pietra Lecture Series is pleased to present this lecture by Scott Aaronson:

Abstract: I'll survey some areas where I think theoretical computer science, math, and statistics can potentially contribute to the urgent quest to align powerful AI with humane values. These areas include: the watermarking of AI outputs, mechanistic interpretability (including Paul Christiano's No-Coincidence Principle, and succinct digests of the training process to aid interpretability), and theoretical guarantees for out-of-distribution generalization.

Speaker: Scott Aaronson is Schlumberger Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, and founding director of its Quantum Information Center. He received his bachelor's from Cornell University and his PhD from UC Berkeley. Aaronson's research has focused mainly on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers. His first book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus, was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. He received the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award, the United States PECASE Award, the Tomassoni-Chisesi Prize in Physics, and the ACM Prize in Computing, and is a Fellow of the ACM and the AAAS and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He blogs at Shtetl-Optimized, https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog.

Location: Della Pietra Family Auditorium (SCGP 103)