Students and Alumni Hear Turing Award Lecture

Events

As part of homecoming week in the School of Computer Science, we had a special distinguished lecture by Ed Clarke, winner of this year’s ACM Turing Award, the highest honor given by the computing research community. The award was announced back in February and the CS faculty were able to get a preview of the Turing lecture at the spring faculty retreat. However, this week was the first opportunity for our students and the many visiting alumni to hear the lecture and personally congratulate Ed Clarke.

The auditorium (Wean Hall 7500) was absolutely packed, with every seat taken and lots of people sitting in the aisles, standing up in the back, and spilling out the doors. The lecture itself was great, giving some history but in reality being a thorough tutorial on the idea of model checking, its application to verifying both hardware and software, and the current research frontier. It’s clear that Ed, after more than half a year of continuous lecturing invitations, is now very, very practiced at giving this talk.  ;-)

Perhaps the most impressive part of the lecture was a slide showing a huge number of collaborators — more than 50 students, postdocs, and faculty visitors — who have come to CMU to work with Ed over the past 27 years. I was amazed not only by the huge impact Ed has had on so many people, but on Ed’s ability to keep such an enormous research program so vital and well-funded. Wow!

Model checking and, more generally, the field of static analysis and verification of software seems poised for some significant advances. The movement of model checking from the hardware to the software domain and the dramatic advances made possible via the use of modern SAT solvers have created many opportunities. When coupled with new ideas in static analysis, a huge design space opens up. I predict some stunning advances in our abilities to analyze even very large and messy programs within a few years.

After the lecture we had a nice reception in Ed’s honor in the Newell-Simon Hall atrium. There was a “no bugs” theme to the affair, with cookies and other food sporting “no bugs” logos. Large portraits of the many CMU-affiliated Turing winners — now including Ed Clarke — were on display. Randy Bryant gave a little speech and then presented Ed with a CMU letter jacket, with the “sport” of “model checking” monogrammed and a “Turing” patch sewn on. Randy quipped that Ed probably never earned a letter jacket in high school…

I had the honor of presenting Ed with an industrial-grade street sign:

I suggested that Ed hang this in front of his house (the sign came with an industrial-grade 7-foot pole), but instead he indicated that this might go somewhere in the new Gates Hillman Center when it opens next year.

Peter Lee @ October 25, 2008