David Harel, Weizmann Institute of Science

David Harel is the Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and is incumbent of the William Sussman Chair of Mathematics. He was Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from 1989 to 1995. He is also co-founder of I-Logix, Inc., Andover, MA, and of Aromix Technologies, Ltd., and is an adjunct professorat the Open University in Israel. He received his B.Sc. from Bar-Ilan University in 1974, his M.Sc. from Tel-Aviv University in 1976 and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978. He has spent two years at IBM's Yorktown Heights research center, sabbatical years at Carnegie-Mellon and Cornell Universities, and summers at IBM, Lucent Technologies Bell Labs, DEC and NASA. His research interests are in computability and complexity theory, logics of programs, theory of databases, automata theory, visual languages and systems engineering, and he has published widely on these topics. He is the inventor of thelanguage of statecharts (1983; see also the more recent 1997 and the 1998 book), and was part of the team that designed the Statemate (1984-1987) and Rhapsody(1997) tools. He is also interested in the communication and synthesis of smell. In 1994 he gave a 13-lecture exposition of computer science on Israeli radio, and in 1998 he presented a 14-program series on Israeli television, in which he hosted prominent computer scientists on a variety of topics. He has received a number of awards, including ACM's Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award in 1992, and the 1997 Israeli Prime Minister's Award. His book, Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing (Addison-Wesley, 1987, 2nd. edn. 1992) was the Spring 1988 Main Selection of the Macmillan Library of Science. He is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE.