Moshe Vardi


Moshe Ya'akov Vardi is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University, United States. He is University Professor, the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering, Distinguished Service Professor, and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology. His interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite-model theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification and reasoning, and teaching logic across the curriculum. He is an expert in model checking, constraint satisfaction and database theory, common knowledge, and theoretical computer science.
Moshe Y. Vardi is the author of over 600 technical papers as well as the editor of several collections. He has authored the books Reasoning About Knowledge with Ronald Fagin, Joseph Halpern, and Yoram Moses, and Finite Model Theory and Its Applications with Erich Grädel, Phokion G. Kolaitis, Leonid Libkin, Maarten Marx, Joel Spencer, Yde Venema, and Scott Weinstein. He is Senior Editor of Communications of the ACM, after serving as its Editor-in-Chief for a decade.

Background

He chaired the Computer Science Department at Rice University from January 1994 until June 2002. Prior to joining Rice in 1993, he was at the IBM Almaden Research Center, where he managed the Mathematics and Related Computer Science Department. Dr Vardi received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981.

Awards

Vardi is the recipient of three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, a co-winner of the 2000 Gödel Prize, a co-winner of the 2005 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, and a co-winner of the LICS 2006 Test-of-Time Award. He is also the recipient of the 2008 and 2017 ACM Presidential Award, the 2008 Blaise Pascal Medal in computational science by the European Academy of Sciences, the 2010 Distinguished Service Award from the Computing Research Association, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society's 2011 Harry H. Goode Memorial Award, the 2018 ACM Special Interest Group for Logic and Computation, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, the European Association for Computer Science Logic, and the Kurt Goedel Society jointly sponsored Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation.
He holds honorary doctorates from eight universities: Saarland University, Germany, the University of Orleans and Université Grenoble Alpes in France, UFRGS in Brazil, the University of Liege in Belgium, the Technical University of Vienna, Austria, the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Professor Vardi is an editor of several international journals and the president of the International Federation of Computational Logicians. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He was designated Highly Cited Researcher by the Institute for Scientific Information, and was elected as a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, and the Academia Europaea. He was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. He was included in the 2019 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to the development and use of mathematical logic in computer science". He has also co-chaired the ACM Task Force on Job Migration.