The INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize is awarded annually to a scholar who has made fundamental contributions to theory in operations research and the management sciences — “contributions that have stood the test of time.” The 2022 prize was awarded to Vijay Vazirani for his sustained and significant research into the design of algorithms, including approximation algorithms, computational complexity theory, and algorithmic game theory. Vazirani, a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), talks about receiving this award. He also discusses his current research and his role as director of the ACO Center @ UCI, an interdisciplinary research center focused on algorithms, combinatorics and optimization. But first, we learn what drew him to the field of computer science.

In November 2022, ChatGPT quietly slipped into global conversations with its human-like responses to text queries. By January 2023, more than 100 million users were interacting with the novel chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI). In February, an AI-powered Microsoft chatbot told a tech journalist to leave his wife: “You’re married, but you love me.”

Now, four months after OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT to the public, AI scholars and tech experts have published an open letter, calling for a pause in AI experiments: “recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control.” The letter’s signees, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, called on “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

With ChatGPT all over the news right now, many are focused on the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning — including Pierre Baldi, long an expert in the field. Yet the Distinguished Professor of computer science in UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) is also closely examining the theoretical side of AI. His recently co-authored paper in the journal Artificial Intelligence, “The Quarks of Attention: Structure and Capacity of Neural Attention Building Blocks,” is one of the first theoretical papers on the topic of attention, which is playing a big role in today’s application of AI.

Whether she’s meeting a colleague for coffee, asking students to perform a skit in class, or trying to pair IT professionals with computer science majors, Associate Professor of Teaching Jennifer Wong-Ma is bringing people together. “I keep coming back to that idea of community,” she says of her work to engage with faculty and students and bridge the gap between academia and industry.