They've authored dozens of papers and taught for decades at prestigious Carnegie Mellon University. And, just recently, they published new research that could serve as a blueprint for developing and demonstrating machine consciousness.

That paper, titled "A Theoretical Computer Science Perspective on Consciousness," may only a be a pre-print paper, but even if it crashes and burns at peer-review (it almost surely won't) it'll still hold an incredible distinction in the world of theoretical computer science.

The Blum's are joined by a third collaborator, one Avrim Blum, their son. Per the Blum's paper:

All three Blums received their PhDs at MIT and spent a cumulative 65 wonderful years on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at CMU. Currently the elder two are emeriti and the younger is Chief Academic Officer at TTI Chicago, a PhD-granting computer science research institute focusing on areas of machine learning, algorithms, AI (robotics, natural language, speech, and vision), data science and computational biology, and located on the University of Chicago campus.

This is their first joint paper.

Hats off to the Blums, there can't be too many theoretical computer science families at the cutting-edge of machine consciousness research. I'm curious what the family pet is like.

Let's move on to the paper shall we? It's a fascinating and well-explained bit of hardcore research that very well could change some perspectives on machine consciousness.