Rice University’s Moshe Vardi Wins IEEE Computer Society Goode Award
Renowned logician honored for fundamental and lasting contributions to computer science

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi has been named the winner of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society’s 2011 Harry H. Goode Award.

Vardi, Rice’s Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and director of Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology, is a renowned logician and member of the National Academy of Engineering. He also holds the high-profile post of editor-in-chief of the Association of Computing Machinery’s flagship publication, Communications of the ACM.

	MOSHE VARDI

The Goode Award was established to recognize achievement in the information-processing field — either a single contribution of theory, design or technique of outstanding significance; or the accumulation of important contributions on theory or practice over an extended period. In announcing this year’s award, the society said Vardi was honored for his “fundamental and lasting contributions to the development of logic as a unifying foundational framework and a tool for modeling computational systems.”

Logic, which is sometimes called “the calculus of computer science,” is fundamental to research areas such as artificial intelligence, computational complexity, distributed computing, database systems, design verification, programming languages and software engineering. Using logic as a framework, Vardi has cultivated research in intelligent databases, multi-agent systems and automated reasoning.

Vardi earned his doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981 and is the author and co-author of approximately 400 articles and two books, “Reasoning about Knowledge” and “Finite Model Theory and Its Applications.” He was honored with the 2010 Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for his leadership, including the organization of an influential 2006 report on overseas job outsourcing in the software industry. The report dispelled some myths about software offshoring and reinforced the case that computing plays a fundamental role in defining success in a competitive global economy.

Vardi’s other honors include the 2010 Distinguished Service Award from the Computing Research Association, the 2000 Goedel Prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science and the 2008 ACM Presidential Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the European Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europea; he also is a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow of IEEE, the ACM, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.