Tuesday, July 3, 2018
Moshe Y. Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University, has this year received two honorary doctorates from European universities.
On May 8 in Austria, Vardi was the recipient of an honorary doctoral degree from the Vienna University of Technology. On July 2, he received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. The citation for the latter reads, in part:
“He has introduced a new paradigm for verifying correctness of software and hardware that has now become standard in industry and is used by Intel, NASA and many others. He pioneered the study of the complexity of querying of data, providing fundamental notions that guide the design of languages and algorithms. He changed the field of constraint satisfaction—a fundamental area of artificial intelligence, and contributed important results to other areas such as logic and reasoning about knowledge.”
Vardi is the author or co-author of more than 600 articles in the area of logic and computation. Vardi earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1981. After two tenures as a scientist for IBM Research and continued work at Stanford University, Vardi joined the Rice faculty in 1993. He served as a consultant at Bell Labs and was a visiting faculty member at the Intel Design Center in Haifa, Israel.
Vardi has co-authored two books, Reasoning about Knowledge and Finite Model Theory and Its Applications, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts. He has received Outstanding Innovation Awards from IBM, the Presidential Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and ACM’s Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award.
He is a Fellow of ACM, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is also a foreign member of the European Academy of Science and Academia Europaea.
Vardi holds honorary doctorates from the Saarland University in Germany, Orleans University in France, UFRGS in Brazil and the University of Liège in Belgium. He is a senior editor of the Communications of the ACM.
Patrick Kurp, Engineering Communications