Computer Science Giant Visits Reykjavík University

Prof. David Harel (The Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) will visit the School of Computer Science at Reykjavík University on Friday, 25 April 2008.  Apart from being a renowned science communicator, Prof. David Harel is, without doubt, one the great thinkers in modern science and has given fundamental contributions to a variety of topics ranging from theoretical computer science, and software and systems engineering to modelling and analysis of biological systems, and the synthesis and communication of smell. He has published more than 185 papers and nine books. In the field of software and systems engineering, Prof. David Harel is best known as the inventor of the language of statecharts, and co-inventor of live sequence charts and of the idea of reactive animation (2002). He was part of the team that designed the tools Statemate (1984-1987),  Rhapsody (1997) and the Play-Engine (2003). His work is central to the behavioral aspects of the Unified Modelling Language (UML). Among his awards are the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (1992), the Stevens Award in Software Development Methods (1996), the Israel Prize in Computer Science (2004), the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (2006), the 2007 ACM Software System Award, and honorary degrees from the University of Rennes (2005), the Open University of Israel (2006) and the University of Milano-Bicocca. He is a Fellow of the ACM (1994) and of the IEEE (1995) and was elected member of the Academia Europaea (2006) and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2007).

Prof. David Harel has consistently devoted part of his time to educational and expository work: In 1984 he delivered a lecture series on Israeli radio, and in 1998 he hosted a series of programs on Israeli television. Some of his writing is intended for a general audience; see, for example, the best-selling books "Computers Ltd.: What They Really Can't Do" (2000) and  "Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing" (1987, 1992, 2004).

During his visit, Prof. Harel will deliver two talks.

• The first talk, entitled In Silico Biology, or On Comprehensive and Realistic Modeling (10:00-11:00 in room K5, Reykjavík University, Kringlan 1), shows how software and systems engineering can be applied beneficially to thelife sciences.
• The second talk, entitled Computers are Not Omnipotent (16:00-17:00 in room 101, Reykjavík University, Ofanleiti 2), will be a public talk for a general audience, which will address one of the most fundamental questions in modern science, " Is there anything that computers cannot do?"

 The abstracts for the talks may be found here. I warmly encourage everyone to attend.

Athugasemdir

[Arnar Pálsson, 11.4.2008 kl. 11:56]

Luca

Thanks for the announcement, naturally I am more curious about the lecture on silico biology. Hopefully I will be able to attend. 

[Luca Aceto, 11.4.2008 kl. 18:03]

Arnar,

I would encourage you to attend the afternoon talk too. It will deal with fundamental limitations of computing, explained in a very accessible way. Harel has been running radio and TV shows in Israel where he explained this material as well as many aspects of the science of computing to the general public. 

I hope to see you there.