“Winning the War on Error: Solving the Halting
Problem and Curing Cancer”
Errors in code for software lead to failures both routine and catastrophic --
and to the vulnerabilities at the root of the escalating security crisis.
Errors in code for people -- the human genome -- give rise to chronic
conditions, devastating rare diseases and, for half of us, cancer. This
talk addresses how to end errors in code -- both digital and biological --
through conservatively approximating solutions to the halting problem for the
former and through a computational rethink of the practice of molecular or
"precision" medicine for the latter.
To evade the halting problem, I will present a broad, universal framework for
conservatively approximating the behavior of programs -- Abstracting Abstract
Machines (AAM) -- and discuss the success of applying this approach to
detecting and eliminating security issues in software.
I will then provide a programmer's introduction and overview of precision
medicine; argue that computation has becoming the limiting reagent in saving
lives; and explain how a computational re-visioning to the practice of medicine
is the key to the diagnosis, discovery and treatment of both rare genetic
disorders and cancers.
Speaker: Matt's
research in computer science focuses on using programming language principles
to improve the safety, security and
performance of modern software systems. Matt's research in medicine
focuses on diagnosis and discovery of genetic disorders and the use of
computing to accelerate and individualize the drug development process.
His research is funded by DARPA, NSF, DOE and NIH.
Matt Might is a Strategist in the Executive Office of the President at the
White House; a Visiting Associate Professor in Biomedical Informatics at the
Harvard Medical School; an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at
the University of Utah; an Adjunct Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical
Chemistry at the University of Utah; a Co-founder of Pairnomix, LLC, and the
President of the NGLY1 Foundation.
Matt tweets from @mattmight and blogs from http://blog.might.net/
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