LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 11 April 2014 – Patrick and Radhia Cousot have been named recipients of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills Award for their invention of abstract interpretation and tools to support its implementation.
The Mills Award recognizes researchers and practitioners who have demonstrated longstanding contributions to information science theory and practice, focusing on applying sound theory to software engineering practice.
Abstract interpretation is a fundamental, general, and unifying theory of sound abstraction and approximation of the mathematical structures involved in the formal semantics, formal specification, static analysis, proof, and verification of computer systems and biological networks. Abstract interpretation can scale up and automatically verify very large systems in advanced real-world industrial applications in transportation, communications, and medicine.
Patrick Cousot is a professor of computer science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Previously he was a professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the École Polytechnique, the University of Metz, and Research Scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France. He holds a doctor ès sciences degree in mathematics from the University Joseph Fourier.
Radhia Cousot is an emeritus CNRS senior research scientist in computer science at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She served as a CNRS junior research scientist, research scientist, and senior research scientist at the University Henri Poincaré of Nancy, University Paris-Sud at Orsay, and École Polytechnique, where she headed the Semantics, Proof, and Abstract interpretation research team. She holds a doctor ès sciences in mathematics from the University of Lorraine, Nancy, France.
Patrick Cousot was awarded the Silver Medal of the CNRS, an honorary doctorate from the Fakultät Mathematik und Informatik of the Universität des Saarlandes, the Grand Prix of Computer Science and its Applications of the EADS Corporate Research Foundation attributed by the French Academy of Sciences, a Humboldt Research Award. He is Member of the Academia Europæa.
Patrick Cousot and Radhia Cousot jointly received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award.
The late Harlan D. Mills was widely recognized for his contributions as a mathematician concerned with bringing more rigor into systems and software development. The award, which consists of a $3,000 honorarium, memento, and possible invited talk, is co-sponsored by IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE). Read more about the Mills Award.
