Brown CS Alum Scott Smolka Has Been Named An ACM Fellow
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on March 8, 2022
Earlier this year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and professional computing society, elevated Brown CS alum Scott Smolka to the rank of Fellow, the organization's highest membership grade, for contributions in process algebra, model checking, and runtime verification. The ACM Fellows Program, initiated in 1993, celebrates the exceptional contributions of leading members of the computing field, and Scott joins a distinguished list of colleagues to whom the ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership in computing and information technology.
Currently a SUNY Distinguished Professor at Stony Brook University's Department of Computer Science, Scott is known for his fundamental research contributions in a number of areas, including process algebra, model checking, probabilistic processes, flocking behavior, and modeling and analysis of cardiac cells and neural circuits. He's perhaps best known for the algorithm he and the late Paris Kanellakis, an esteemed and beloved Brown CS faculty member, invented for deciding bisimulation. This algorithm, which has come to be known as the K-S Relational Coarsest Partitioning algorithm, can be used to efficiently decide bisimulation equivalence, a cornerstone of Milner's CCS and other process-algebraic formalisms, in polynomial time.
Most recently, Scott was the co-recipient, with Paris, of the 2021 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing.
The full list of 2021 ACM Fellows is available here.
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communication and Outreach Specialist Jesse C. Polhemus.
