Professor Patrick Cousot

A French Professor of Computer Science; who in 1975, together with his wife Radhia, is the co-originator of abstract interpretation which is an influential technique in formal methods. In the 2000s, he worked on practical methods of static analysis for critical embedded software (Astr?e), such as is found in avionics. Abstract interpretation is a theory of sound approximation of mathematical structures, in particular those involved in the behavior of computer systems. It allows the systematic derivation of sound methods and algorithms for approximating undecidable or highly complex problems in various areas of computer science (semantics, verification and proof, model-checking, static analysis, program transformation and optimization, typing, software steganography, etc.). Its current main industrial application is on the safety and security of complex hardware and software computer systems. Abstract Interpretation has proved to scale up to automatically verify very large systems as found in advanced real-world industrial applications in transportation, communications and medicine. From 1974 to 1979 he was Research Scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research at the University of Grenoble. He was appointed Professor of Computer Science at the ?cole Normale Sup?rieure (ENS) in Paris in 1991; and in March 2008, he became a Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University in New York City, USA. Earlier in 2005, he was a J.C. Hunsaker Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While at the ?cole Normale Sup?rieure (ENS) he developed the educational activities in Computer Science and created and headed the research laboratory at the University of Metz (1979-1984); and was Director of the Computer Science educational activities and led the research on abstract interpretation and semantics (ENS-CNRS-INRIA joint project team "Abstraction"); the ?cole Polytechnique (1984-1997). He is an Engineer from ?cole des Mines of Nancy (1971), Doctor Engineer (PhD) in Computer Science (1974) and Doctor ?s Sciences in Mathematics (1978) from the University of Grenoble. He is a knight (Chevalier) in the Ordre National du M?rite and the Ordre des Palmes acad?miques. In 1999 he received the CNRS Silver medal and in 2006 the great prize of the EADS Foundation. In 2001, he was bestowed an honorary doctorate by Saarland University, Germany. With Radhia Cousot, he received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award in 2013 and the IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills award in 2014; ?For the invention of ?abstract interpretation?, development of tool support, and its practical application?. He is a member of the Board of Trustees at the IMDEA Software Institute.