News

March 1, 2006 - The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded Moshe Y. Vardi, Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering, and three of his colleagues—Gerard J. Holzmann of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Robert P. Kurshan of Cadence Design Systems, and Pierre Wolper of the University of Liege, Belgium — the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for 2005.  The four awardees are recognized “for the development of automata-theoretic techniques for reactive-systems verification, and the practical realization of powerful formal-verification tools based on these techniques."

From the ACM's press release:

"The honorees addressed a key problem in computer science:  finding ways to verify that hardware and software designs meet their specifications. This problem is particularly challenging in systems that interact with their environments, such as digital systems and communication protocols. These systems are characteristic of large telephone networks, and are known as reactive systems. Their techniques are widely used commercially in 'control-intensive' computer programs."

"The honorees demonstrated the use of mathematical analysis of formal models to check the correctness of these reactive systems. They showed how this approach yields algorithms which can be made efficient enough to make automated reasoning practical. Their body of work, in turn, provided the algorithmic foundations for the formal verification tools they were involved in developing."

The Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing.

This award is accompanied by a prize of $5,000 and is endowed by contributions from the Kanellakis family, with additional financial support provided by ACM's Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computational Theory (SIGACT), Design Automaton (SIGDA), Management of Data (SIGMOD), and Programming Languages (SIGPLAN), the ACM SIG Projects Fund, and individual contributions.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is an international scientific and educational organization dedicated to advancing the arts, sciences, and applications of information technology.

Click here for the official press release