Turing Awards

A Bachelor Seminar across HPI

The A.M. Turing Award, the Association of Computing Machinery's most prestigious technical award, is given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing. The award was first given in 1966 to Alan J Perlis for his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction. Since then 62 women and men, the best compter scientists, have been given the award for their contributions in various fields, such as  Jim Gray for transaction management, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn for internetworking and TCP/IP, Marvin Minsky for artificial intelligence, Don Knuth for algorithm analysis, Douglas Engelbart for interactive computing, and Barbara Liskov for programming language design.

Seminar goals and tasks

The goal of this seminar is to introduce bachelor students to the excitement of computer science research by studying seminal works of the best minds in the field. Students will learn how to approach the specific field, how to read scientific papers, how to concisely explain complex algorithms, proofs, and models, and how to succinctly write a term paper on a computer science topic.

The various topics of the seminar can be advised by HPI researchers across all groups within HPI. Introductory classes on how to read, present, and write good papers will be given by Prof. Felix Naumann (and others?).

Each seminar participant will study and present the work that led to one of the awards and is expected to achieve the following:

• A 15 minute presentation of the topic, including (i) the award winner(s), (ii) the research achievements, and (iii) the impact of that research
• An A2 poster outlining the same content as the presentation
• Active participation during all plenary meetings
• A 4-page paper explaining the most important result

Presentations, poster, and paper can be given in English or German. All four components will be graded separately, to form the final non-weighted average grade. You will receive 3 credits (Leistungspunkte) for this seminar. The topics will be distributed among the students based on a Doodle, to be published here during the first week of the semester.

Topics