Monty Newborn received his Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering from The Ohio State University in 1967. He was an assistant professor and then associate professor at Columbia University in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 1967-1975. In 1975, he joined the School of Computer Science at McGill University and has been with the School since then, serving as its director from 1976-1983. He has been an ACM Fellow since 1994.

His research focuses on search problems in artificial intelligence where two areas are of particular interest: chess-playing programs and automated theorem-proving programs. He has published seven books on these subjects and a number of research papers as well. He served as chairman of the ACM Computer Chess Committee from 1981 until 1997. In that capacity he organized the first Kasparov versus Deep Blue match (known as the ACM Chess Challenge) in 1996. The following year he served as head of the officials at the second Kasparov versus Deep Blue match won by Deep Blue. Through the 1970s and 1980s, his chess program Ostrich competed in five world championships, coming close to winning in 1974.

Octopus and Theo, two automated theorem-proving programs developed over the last fifteen years are the current focus of his work. They both competed in the recent 2006 World Championship for ATP Systems in Seattle, Washington. Octopus, a multiprocessor version of Theo, ran on 133 PCs in the School's laboratories during the competition, searching in parallel for proofs of theorems chosen by the competition's organizers. In the 2004 competition, Octopus performed admirably, solving more theorems among those that no entry had seen before than any other entry. Octopus and Theo finished best of the North American entries. 

• Computer Chess: The Road to Defeating Kasparov:

  The talk will survey the chain of advances that lead to Deep Blue's victory over Garry Kasparov in 1997. The early chess programs will be examined first leading to Richard Greenblatt's Mac Hack in the late 1960s.

  Then the car...

• Deep Blue in Retrospect:

  The history of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer will be reviewed from it inception at CMU in 1986 to its defeat of Garry Kasparov in 1997. The talk will generally follow the material presented in "Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Mil...