Other Information#

Laudatio by an unknown person

Pierre Wolper, together with Moshe Vardi, is the inventor of the automata-theoretic approach to model checking. It is difficult to overestimate the relevance of this work. Model checking is a leading technique for the verification of hardware and software systems, whose inventors (Clarke, Emerson, Sifakis) received the Turing Award in 2008. Vardi and Wolper showed that a complete body of theoretical work on automata theory initiated by Büchi, McNaughton, Rabin, and others since the 1960s could be applied to model checking problems. Their techniques were implemented by Kurshan in the COSPAN tool, and later by Holzmann in the SPIN tool, an enormously influential tool for the analysis and verification of software that received the ACM Software System Award in 2001. Vardi and Wolper themselves received the Gödel Prize 2000 for this work, probably the most important prize in theoretical computer science worldwide, and, together with Kurshan and Holzmann, the ACM Kanellakis Theory and Practice award 2005. Today, automata-based model checkers are routinely used by all major hardware and software vendors, especially by Intel and Microsoft.

Together with his PhD student Patrice Godefroid, Wolper was one one of the proposers of partial-order techniques for model checking. These techniques allowed model checkers to become substantially faster when applied to concurrent systems. Godefroid is currently a principal investigatot at Microsoft Research, and responsible for SAGE, one of the most advance tools for automatic testing. Godefroid and Wolper received in 2011 The Test-of-time award of the LICS conference for the 1991 LICS paper with the largest impact after 20 years.

More recently, together with his PhD student Bernard Boigelot, today Professor at Liege, Wolper developed the theory of finite automata as acceptors of set of numbers. Boigelot and Wolper developed the algorithmics of the approach and implemented it in the highly influential LASH tool.

Pierre Wolper's major scientific achievements are already mentioned above. The first, jointly with Vardi, is the automata-theoretic approach to model checking. The impact of this has been exceptional, both in terms of take up by researchers and industrial tool builders, as well as recognition through major prizes. The partial-order approach to model checking (with his PhD student Godefroid) was also very well received and influential. The strongest evidence of impact is recognition through major prizes: the Goedel prize and Kannelakis Award, and not just one but two LICS Test-of-Time awards.

Wolper has published in the best and highly selective venues in theoretical computer science, to mention conferences LICS, FOCS and CONCUR and journals JACM, Information & Computation, ACM TOCL and FMSD. He has H-index of 42 and over 10,000 citations in Google Scholar.

Wolper has been very successful in doctoral training: of the 7 PhD students he supervised, two are now full professors (Boigelot, Kabanza) and two are at Microsoft (Godefroid, Latour), actively engaged in ensuring industrial impact of their research.

He is a valued member of the research community and has been active through professional memberships (e.g. ACM), numerous Programme Committee memberships and editorial boards of leading journals (FMSD and LMCS).

Finally, Pierre Wolper is also an acknowledge expert on scientific policies. Since 2009 he is Vice-Rector for research of the University of Liege.

Any further pages in alphabetic order of their title as created by you.
#

Just click at "Create new page", then type a short title and click OK, then add information on the empty page presented to you (including maybe a picture from your harddisk or a pdf-file by using the "Upload" Button) and finally click at "Save".
...no Data available yet!