The 10th Annual Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Lecture

"From Philosophical to Industrial Logics"

Moshe Y. Vardi, Rice University

Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 4:00 P.M.

Room 368 (CIT 3rd Floor)

One of the surprising developments in the area of program verification is how several ideas introduced by logicians in the first part of the 20th century ended up yielding at the start of the 21st century industry-standard property-specification languages called PSL and SVA. This development was enabled by the equally unlikely transformation of the mathematical machinery of automata on infinite words, introduced in the early 1960s for second-order arithmetics, into effective algorithms for industrial model-checking tools. This talk attempts to trace the tangled threads of this development.

This lecture series honors Paris Kanellakis, a distinguished computer scientist who was an esteemed and beloved member of the Brown Department of Computer Science. Paris joined the Department in 1981 and became a full professor in 1990. His research area was theoretical computer science, with emphasis on the principles of database systems, logic in computer science, the principles of distributed computing and combinatorial optimization. He died in an airplane crash on December 20, 1995, along with his wife, Maria Teresa Otoya, and their two young children, Alexandra and Stephanos Kanellakis.

A reception will follow.

Host: Shriram Krishnamurthi