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Mon 2 Mar, '26
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CS Colloquium: Complexity in the Era of AI and Data-Driven Computing (Lance Fortnow - Illinois Institute of Technology)
CS1.04

Complexity in the Era of AI and Data-Driven Computing

Lance Fortnow

Illinois Institute of Technology

In 2013 I wrote a book chapter on an imagined world where P = NP. A world with advances in medicine, translation, video recognition and generation, and much more. With the advances we’ve seen in computing power, optimization, data-driven algorithms, and of course remarkable advances in artificial intelligence, much of this world is coming true. We’ve made dramatic progress on problems thought unsolvable a decade ago. With one major exception, our cryptographic protocols have remained secure.

How did we get to this seemingly impossible world I call Optiland where we can solve many difficult problems quickly in practice while our secrets remain secure, and what does it mean for our understanding and role of computational complexity?

We’ll give a (mostly) non-technical overview that takes a step back and rethinks complexity in light of these advances, what AI tells us about complexity, and what complexity tells us about AI.
Lance Fortnow


Lance Fortnow

Biography

Lance Fortnow is a professor in Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He founded the College of Computing at Illinois Tech and served as its inaugural dean from June 2020 to June 2025, after starting as the Dean of Science in 2019.

Fortnow received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at MIT in 1989 under the supervision of Michael Sipser. Before he joined Illinois Tech, Fortnow was the chair of the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology and previously was a professor at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, a senior research scientist at the NEC Research Institute and a one-year visitor at CWI and the University of Amsterdam. From 2007 to 2018 Fortnow held an adjoint professorship at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

Fortnow's research spans computational complexity and its applications. His work on interactive proof systems and time-space lower bounds for satisfiability have led to his election as a 2007 ACM Fellow. In addition he was an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow from 1992-1998 and a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands in 1996-97. His current research focuses on how artificial intelligence changes the way we think about both the theory and applications of computing.

Among his many activities, Fortnow served as the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transaction on Computation Theory, served as chair of ACM SIGACT and on the Computing Research Association board of directors. He served as chair of the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity from 2000-2006. Fortnow originated and co-authors the Computational Complexity weblog since 2002, the first major theoretical computer science blog. He has over six thousand social media followers.

Fortnow's survey The Status of the P versus NP Problem is one of the CACM's most downloaded article. Fortnow has written a popular science book The Golden Ticket: P, NP and the Search for the Impossible loosely based on that article.
More information | Tags: DIMAP Seminar Artificial Intelligence and Human-Centred Computing Computer Science Colloquium Theory and Foundations AI & ML Systems Foundations of AI & ML

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