Moshe Y. Vardi, University Professor at Rice, has received the 2025 CAV Award for his "fundamental contributions in designing temporal logics that led to highly successful industry-standard property-specification languages based on temporal logics such as ForSpec, Sugar, PSL, and SVA."
Vardi shares this award with a large team of co-recipients from IBM and Intel, including Roy Armoni, Ilan Beer, Shoham Ben-David, Cindy Eisner, Dana Fisman, Limor Fix, John Havlicek, Avner Landver and Hiller Miller.
The CAV award is a prestigious annual award presented at the International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV). It recognizes fundamental contributions to the field of Computer-Aided Verification, including algorithms, tools, mathematical foundations, and applications. Vardi accepted the award at this year’s CAV conference in Croatia in July.
The award acknowledges Vardi and team’s work on temporal logics and automata, which are expressive languages used for the formal descriptions of system requirements. This work enabled the use of automated or interactive verification of system properties.
The CAV Award highlights the efforts of the industrial teams in continuing the journey from academic foundations to industrial adoption. Formal methods and model checking have since become a part of the design process in the hardware industry and have inspired new innovations in expressiveness and scalability.
At Rice, Vardi is University Professor and the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering. His research interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite-model theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems, and computer-aided verification and reasoning.
Vardi earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1981. After two tenures as a research scientist for IBM Research and continued work at Stanford University, Vardi joined the Rice faculty in 1993.
He has authored or co-authored more than 800 scientific papers. He is senior editor of Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), after serving as its editor-in-chief for a decade. He holds honorary titles from ten international universities.
Among his many honors are membership in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, Academia Europaea, and the Royal Society of London. Vardi is a fellow of ACM, IEEE, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Mathematical Society.
To read more about the award, visit https://conferences.i-cav.org/2025/award/.