British researcher takes home Turing Award

A British computer scientist specialising in computational learning has been named the 2011 Turing Award winner.

Harvard University professor Leslie G. Valiant was given the award for work which helped to spur advances in artificial intelligence, language processing, image comprehension and handwriting processing.

Valiant's work has focused on multiple areas of computational learning. He introduced the Probably Approximately Correct learning model, and has researched methods for algebraic computation and parallel processing systems.

"Leslie Valiant's accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and led to extraordinary achievements in machine learning," said Alain Chesnais, president of the Association for Computing Machinery.

"His work has produced modelling that offers computationally inspired answers on fundamental questions like how the brain 'computes'."

The award comes at a time when advances in artificial intelligence are taking centre stage. Valiant's work was cited in helping to lay the groundwork for complex analytical systems such as IBM's Watson computing cluster.

In addition to the prestigious Turing Award, Valiant will be given a $250,000 cash prize sponsored by Google and Intel.

A graduate of the University of Warwick and University of Cambridge, Valiant taught at Leeds University and the University of Edinburgh. He has been working at Harvard since 1982.

Shekhar Borkar, Intel Fellow and director of the firm's microprocessor technology labs, likened Valiant's work to Alan Turing's.

"His approach invites comparison with Turing himself: a novel formulation starting from a deep fundamental insight. Intel is pleased to support this award," he said.