Ed Clarke Wins the Turing Award
Just released: Ed Clarke has been awarded the 2007 A.M. Turing Award!
The award, which will be shared with E. Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis, cites the pioneering development of the model-checking method for finding errors in hardware and software designs, sparking an extremely active area of research and changing how the computer hardware industry verifies its chip designs. E. Allen Emerson was Ed Clarke’s graduate student, while Ed was at Harvard, working together on model checking. Emerson later took a faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin, while Ed came to CMU and continued his research on model checking. Joseph Sifakis independently developed a verification method similar to model checking at CNRS in Grenoble, France.
Here at CMU, Ed Clarke’s work has been extremely influential on many fronts. In basic research, Ed has made it possible for the CMU Computer Science Department to be a powerhouse in both the hardware and software verification areas. For example, Ed and a former graduate student, Ken McMillan (now at Cadence Research Labs), figured out that model checking could be implemented extremely efficiently by using a remarkably clever data structure, the binary decision diagram, developed by Randy Bryant. Later, Bryant, Clarke, Emerson, and McMillan won the Paris Kanellakis Award, which recognizes particularly important research contributions that make large impacts on both computing theory and practice. Besides research, Ed has been an incredibly productive teacher and Ph.D. advisor. His many Ph.D. students have been remarkably successful in both academia and industry.
Turing Award winners are not all that rare here. Raj Reddy and Manuel Blum are active in their research, teaching, and advising. Dana Scott is only recently retired and still engaged in some departmental affairs. Seven other Turing winners have been a faculty member or student at CMU at some point in their careers. But it is always great to see someone like Ed get a recognition like this, since he considers himself to be a “homegrown” member of the Computer Science Department, having worked almost his entire career at CMU.
I can’t tell you how excited and proud I am! Please join me in congratulating Ed Clarke, our newest Turing Award winner!
Peter Lee @ February 4, 2008
Randy Bryant just sent an email announcement to the whole School of Computer Science:
Fellow members of SCS and ECE:
I am thrilled to report to you that Prof. Edmund M. Clarke, Fore Systems Professor of Computer Science, is a winner of the 2007 ACM Turing Award, considered the highest award for a researcher in computer science.
Ed is sharing the award with his former PhD student, Allen Emerson, now at University of Texas, and Josef Sifakis, of the University of Grenoble.
The award is in recognition of the development of Model Checking, initiated by Clarke and Emerson, and with a similar idea developed independently by Sifakis, all in 1981. Ed has continued to pursue Model Checking as the main focus of his career, and through his efforts it has become an important research area and of great practical importance for the computer hardware and software industries.
My heartfelt congratulations to Ed!
Ed joins Manuel Blum, Raj Reddy, and Dana Scott as Turing Prize winners on the current current CMU faculty. Allen Newell, Herb Simon, Bob Floyd, and Alan Perlis were also winners with CMU faculty connections.
The official press release can be found here.