Radhia Cousot


Radhia Cousot was a French computer scientist known for inventing abstract interpretation.

Studies

Radhia Cousot was born on 6 August 1947, in Sakiet Sidi Youssef in Tunisia, where she survived the :fr:Bombardement de Sakiet Sidi Youssef|massacre of the children in her school on February 8, 1958. She then went to the :fr:Lycée de jeunes filles|Lycée de jeunes filles at Sousse, the :fr:Lycée français|Lycée français at Algiers and then the Polytechnic School of Algiers. She specialized in mathematical optimization and integer linear programming. Supported by a UNESCO , she obtained a master's degree in Computer Science at the Joseph Fourier University of Grenoble in 1972. She obtained her :fr:Doctorat en sciences|Doctorate ès Sciences/State Doctorate in Mathematics in Nancy in 1985 under the supervision of.

Career

Radhia Cousot was appointed Associate research scientist at the IMAG laboratory of the Joseph Fourier University of Grenoble and, from 1980 on, at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, as junior research scientist, research scientist, senior research scientist, and senior research scientist emerita at the Computer Science laboratories of the Henri Poincaré University of Nancy, the University of Paris-Sud at Orsay, the École Polytechnique where from 1991 she headed the research team “Semantics, Proof and Abstract interpretation”, and the École Normale Supérieure.

Scientific achievements

Together with her husband Patrick, Radhia Cousot is the originator of abstract interpretation, an influential technique in formal methods. Abstract interpretation is based on three main ideas.
  1. Any reasoning/proof/static analysis on a computer system refers to a semantics describing, at some level of abstraction, its possible executions.
  2. The reasoning/proof/static analysis should abstract away all semantic properties irrelevant to the reasoning.
  3. Because of undecidability, sound, fully automated, and always terminating reasonings on/proofs/static analysis of computer systems must perform mathematical inductions in the abstract and so, can only be approximate.
In her thesis, Radhia Cousot advanced the semantics, proof, and static analysis methods for concurrent and parallel programs.
Radhia Cousot is at the origin of the contacts with Airbus in January 1999 that lead to the development of
Astrée run-time error analyzer from 2001 onwards, a tool for sound static program analysis of embedded
control/command software developed at the École Normale Supérieure and now distributed by AbsInt GmbH, a German software company specialized on static analysis. Astrée is used in the transportation, space, and medical software industries.

Awards

With Patrick Cousot, she received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award in 2013 and the IEEE Computer Society IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills award in 2014 for “the invention of ‘abstract interpretation’, development of tool support, and its practical application”.

Radhia Cousot best young researcher paper award

Since September 2014, the Radhia Cousot best young researcher paper award is attributed annually by the program chair on behalf of the program committee of the Static Analysis Symposia.