Biography

Moshe Y. Vardi is the George Professor in Computational Engineering and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University. He chaired the Computer Science Department at Rice University from January 1994 to 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. His research interests include database systems, computational-complexity theory, multi-agent systems, and design specification and verification.

Vardi received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981. He is the author and co-author of about 400 articles, as well as two books, “Reasoning about Knowledge” and “Finite Model Theory and Its Applications,” and the editor of several collections.

Vardi is the recipient of numerous awards, including three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, the 2000 Goedel Prize, the 2005 ACM Kanellakis Award for Theory and Practice, the 2006 LICS Test-of-Time Award, the 2008 ACM PODS Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award, the 2008 ACM SIGMOD Codd Innovations Award, the 2008 Blaise pascal Medal for Computer Science by the European Academy of Sciences, the 2008 ACM Presidential Award, the 2010 CRA Distinguished Service Award, and the 2010 ACM Outstanding Contribution Award.

He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Saarland, Germany, and the University of Orleans, France. Vardi is an editor of several international journals, and Editor-in-Chief of the Communication of ACM. He is Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the European Academy of Sciences, and the Academia Europea.

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