Turing Minds Information

Turing Minds was founded by Zachary Axel and Parsa Khazaeepoul, then graduate students at Georgia Tech with a deceptively simple idea: cold-email the most legendary minds in computing and ask them to show up for students. It worked. What began in 2023 as a student-led initiative grew into the premier global speaker series for computer science luminaries, hosting 15 Turing Award winners including Donald Knuth, Geoffrey Hinton, Vinton Cerf, and Pat Hanrahan, and reaching audiences across the world. The Turing Award is widely regarded as the Nobel Prize of Computing, and Turing Minds brought roughly 20% of all living recipients directly to a global audience. Axel built the series from scratch: securing institutional backing from Georgia Tech senior leadership, a sponsorship with the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), and a partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): the very organization that administers the Turing Award, giving the series access to over 110,000 members in more than 170 countries. The work was covered by the Georgia Tech College of Computing and the Atlanta Jewish Times. Georgia Tech’s Dean Emeritus Zvi Galil, creator of OMSCS, called it “a remarkable achievement” and “the premier global speaker platform for computer science luminaries.” Turing Minds concluded its run having done exactly what it set out to do: connect the next generation of innovators with the people who shaped computing as we know it.