Lessons from Texas, COVID-19, and the 737 Max: Efficiency vs. Resilience | Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture

In both computer science and economics, efficiency is a cherished property. The field of algorithms is almost solely focused on their efficiency. The goal of AI research is to increase efficiency by reducing human labor. In economics, the main advantage of the free market is that it promises “economic efficiency.” A major lesson from many recent disasters is that both fields have overemphasized efficiency and underemphasized resilience. In this lecture, Moshe Y. Vardi argues that resilience is a more important property than efficiency and discusses how these fields can broaden their focus to make resilience a primary consideration.

Moshe Y. Vardi is University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. His research focuses on the interface of mathematical logic and computation, including database theory, hardware/software design and verification, multiagent systems, and constraint satisfaction. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the ACM SIGACT Gödel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Innovations Award, the Knuth Prize, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Memorial Award, and the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award. He is the author or coauthor of over 750 papers, as well as two books. He is a Guggenheim fellow as well as a fellow of several societies and a member of several academies, including the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society of London. He holds 10 honorary titles. He is a senior editor of Communications of the ACM, the premier publication in computing.

The Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lectures were created in Fall 2019 to celebrate the role of Simons Institute Founding Director Dick Karp in establishing the field of theoretical computer science, formulating its central problems, and contributing stunning results in the areas of computational complexity and algorithms. Formerly known as the Simons Institute Open Lectures, the series features visionary leaders in the field of theoretical computer science and is geared toward a broad scientific audience.

Light refreshments will be available at 3:30 p.m., prior to the start of the lecture. 

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