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2007 Turing Award Winners Announced

Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis are the recipients of the 2007 A.M. Turing Award for their work on an automated method for finding design errors in computer hardware and software.


Clarke, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Emerson, of the University of Texas, Austin, and Joseph Sifakis of the University of Grenoble, will share $250,000. The Turing Award, presented annually by the Association for Computing Machinery, is considered to be the most prestigious award in computing. Often referred to as "the Nobel Prize of computing," it is named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing


Clarke implemented the first Model Checker in 1982. It could analyze all the possible states of a given circuit, but was limited to relatively small designs -- much smaller than the systems being built by computer manufacturers. In 1987, Clarke's graduate student, Kenneth McMillan, realized that he could implement Model Checking by a series of operations on binary decision diagrams (BDDs), a method of representing symbolic information that had recently been developed by another Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, Randal E. Bryant. This new system, called "Symbolic Model Checking," was able to analyze billions of billions of states, making it relevant to commercial computer design problems and leading to its widespread adoption by the industry. For this invention, Bryant, Clarke, Emerson and McMillan won the 1998 Paris Kanellakis Award for Theory and Practice from the ACM. In 1999, they also received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence from CMU.

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