Prakash Panangaden


Prakash Panangaden is an American/Canadian computer scientist noted for
his research in programming languages, concurrency theory, Markov processes and duality theory.
Earlier he worked on quantum field theory in curved space-time and radiation from black holes.
He is the founding Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Logic and Computation.

Biography

Prakash Panangaden was born in Pune, India on March 11, 1954. He received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee under the supervision of Leonard Parker.
His PhD thesis was on renormalization of interacting fields in curved spacetime.
Prakash has successfully graduated 14 students and has in total 36 academic descendants.
He joined the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University in 1985 as an Assistant
Professor, where he worked in the Nuprl project and co-authored a book. He moved to McGill University as an associate professor in the School of Computer Science
in 1990 and was promoted to professor in 1996.
He has been keynote speaker at many conferences, including the two top conferences in the field – LICS and ICALP.

Awards

In 2017, the Test-of-Time Award Committee consisting of Christel Baier, Amy Felty, Andrew Pitts and Nicole Schweikardt chose the paper Bisimulation for Labelled Markov Processes as one of two papers from LICS 1997 that has had the most impact in the 20 years since its publication. In 2013 Prakash Panagaden was elected a FRSC.
His citation reads:
"Prakash Panangaden's research career has spanned computer science, mathematics and physics.
He has worked on programming languages, probabilistic systems, quantum computation and relativity.
He is particularly known for deep connections between domain theory and continuous-state Markov processes
where he and his colleagues proved a striking logical characterization theorem. He and Keye Martin discovered
a remarkable way to reconstruct spacetime topology from causal structure using mathematical
ideas from programming languages."
He was honoured on his 60th birthday by his research community. There was a three-day symposium, called PrakashFest, held at Oxford University
and a Festschrift was published by Springer-Verlag.
The summary of the Festschrift reads:
"This Festschrift volume contains papers presented at a conference, Prakash Fest, held in honor of Prakash Panangaden, in Oxford, UK, in May 2014, to celebrate his 60th birthday.
Prakash Panangaden has worked on a large variety of topics including probabilistic and concurrent computation, logics and duality and quantum information and computation.
Despite the enormous breadth of his research, he has made significant and deep contributions. For example, he introduced logic and a real-valued interpretation of the logic to
capture equivalence of probabilistic processes quantitatively."
In 1999 he was awarded the Leo Yaffe Award by the Faculty of Science of McGill University for excellence in teaching.