On October 13, Professor Joseph Halpern from Cornell University, member of the US National Academy of Engineering, was invited to visit the School of Computer Science and Information Engineering and gave a lecture entitled “Actual Causality: A Survey”. The lecture was chaired by Professor WU Xindong, Director of the Key Laboratory of Knowledge Engineering with Big Data (Ministry of Education).
In the lecture, Professor Halpern introduced the definition of causality and analyzed how causality is modelled and applied. Later he discussed several issues with the theory of actual causality and its trends. The attendees, the teaching staff and students alike, showed great interest in Professor Halpern’s speech, responding actively with heated discussions and questions.
Joseph Halpern is a fellow of the AAAI, the ACM, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Game Theory Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. His research focuses on the interface between game and decision theory and computer science, on reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, and on causality.He received the Kampe de Feriet Award in 2016, the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2011, the Dijkstra Prize in 2009, the ACM/AAAI Newell Award in 2009, the Godel Prize in 1997, was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001-02, and a Fulbright Fellow in 2001-02 and 2009-10. Two of his papers have won best-paper prizes at IJCAI (1985 and 1991), and another two received best-paper awards at the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Conference (2006 and 2012). He was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM (1997-2003) and has been program chair of a number of conferences, including the Symposium on Theory in Computing (STOC), Logic in Computer Science (LICS), Uncertainty in AI (UAI), Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), and Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK).

