Will share $250,000 prize for method that detects hardware, software errors

Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Edmund M. Clarke and two other computer scientists will receive the 2007 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Click here for more information.

PITTSBURGH— Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Professor Edmund M. Clarke and two computer scientists from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Grenoble in France, are winners of the 2007 A.M. Turing Award in recognition of their pioneering work on an automated method for finding design errors in computer hardware and software.

The method, called Model Checking, is the most widely used technique for detecting and diagnosing errors in complex hardware and software design. It has helped to improve the reliability of complex computer chips, systems and networks.

The Turing Award, presented annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is considered to be the most prestigious award in computing. Often referred to as “the Nobel Prize of computing,” it is named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing.

Clarke, the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and professor of electrical and computer engineering, will share the award and its $250,000 prize with E. Allen Emerson, who worked with Clarke in developing Model Checking as his graduate student at Harvard University and later as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Also sharing the award is Joseph Sifakis who, working independently, developed a similar technique at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Grenoble.

“We at Carnegie Mellon take pride in solving real-world problems and few projects exemplify that quality better than Ed Clarke’s work on Model Checking,” said Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon. “Reliability has become critical as computer technology has grown in both complexity and ubiquity. Model Checking gives us confidence that these machines will do what we expect and need them to do.”