IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 16

companies and a variety of sponsors that are providing a significant
amount of financial and logistic
resources currently used to build
an increasing network of partners
worldwide. To me, all of this effort
seems not only quite weak from a
scientific and technological viewpoint, but also very dangerous
because of the negative and misleading perception that it can generate in society about the ultimate
research aims and ethical background of our community.
I believe it is important to raise
awareness within SSIT, in the
Robotics and Automation Society
(RAS), and in IEEE at large about
these initiatives. This is perfectly

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine in this effort.

feasible and timely, as demonstrated by the Association for the
Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), which has recently promoted a dialogue with The
Future of Life Institute, another
private initiative that promotes
research so "to ensure that AI systems are robust and beneficial,
doing what humans want them
to do" (futureoflife.org). The IEEE
Robotics and Automation Society
and AAAI cooperation to foster
convergence of AI and robotics is
ongoing (see [2, p. 106] for a report
on recent activities). I am happy to
know that IEEE Technology and
Society Magazine is already very
active and interested in joining

Author Information
Eugenio Guglielmelli is the Editor-inChief of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine. Presently he is the
Head of the Research Unit of Biomedical Robotics and Biomicrosystems at
the Campus Bio-Medico University,
Roma, Italy. Email: ram-eic@ieee.org.

References
[1] R.A. Brooks, "Elephants don't play
chess," Robotics & Automation Syst., vol. 6,
pp. 3-15, 1990.
[2] M. Meghjani, "RAS supports AAAI, IEEE
Robotics & Automation Mag., vol. 22, no. 2,
pp. 106-107, June 2015.

BOOK REvIEwS (continued from page 9)

Alan Turing and Hugh Alexander.
Thus Alexander, far from being the
subject of the letter's complaint,
was one of its signatories! The
baseless canard in the movie is
particularly annoying because Alexander was in fact one of the best
cryptanalysts working on the Naval
Enigma (Jack Good once wrote, "I
was quite good at this game [Banburismus], but Alexander was the
champion"), and had a long and distinguished career at GCHQ after the
war. Why distort history when the
reality itself is so compelling?
In sum: Hodges's book was -
and remains - the definitive overall

biography of Turing. It is an exemplary work of scholarship to which
Hodges brought dedication, enthusiasm, and passion. It is hard to
imagine its discussion of Turing's
life before or after the war being
substantially improved on for a very
long time. But for the period of the
war itself, Hodges labored under the
disadvantage that at the time he
wrote, only a very limited amount
of information was available about
Turing's wartime activities. Today
various detailed accounts of the
cryptologic war have appeared, such
as Stephen Budiansky's Battle of
Wits, but the definitive discussion

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

and assessment of Turing's part in
all this remains to be written.

Author Information
Sandy Zabell is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Northwestern University. He has written
a commentary for Cryptologia on
two wartime papers of Turing first
released in 2012, and an essay
on "Statistics at Bletchley Park,"
for the scholarly edition of the
"General Report on Tunny" currently in press. His email address
is: zabell@math.northwestern.edu.

∕

september 2015

http://www.futureoflife.org

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