Moshe Y. Vardi - Biographical Sketch

Moshe Y. Vardi is University Professor and the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor of Computational Engineering. He currently leads the Technology, Culture, and Society Initiative at Rice University. He chaired the Computer Science Department at Rice University from 1994 utill 2002, and led the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University from 2001 until 2019. 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 focus on logic and computation, 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 over 750 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, the 2010 ACM Outstanding Contribution Award, the 2011 IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Award, the 2012 EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award, the 2013 Southeastern Universities Research Association's Distinguished Scientist Award, the 2017 ACM Presidential Award, the 2018 ACM SIGLOG Church Award, the 2021 Knuth Prize, the 2021 ACM Allen Newell Award, and the 2021 IEEE Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility. He holds honorary titles from the University of Saarland in Germany, the University of Orleans in France, UFRGS in Brazil, the University of Liege in Belgium, the Technical University of Vienna in Austria, the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, the University of Grenoble-Alpes in France, East China Normal University in China, and Gothenburg University in Sweden. Vardi is an editor of several international journals, and Senior Editor of the Communication of ACM, having served for a decade as Editor-in-Chief. He is Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society, the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association, the Association of Computing Machinery, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the European Academy of Sciences, and the Academia Europaea.