Professor Moshe Y. Vardi, renowned computer scientist and former chair of the Computer Science Department at Rice University, will present on February 24, 2014 as part of this year’s Department of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series (DLS). The 2016-2017 Stony Brook University Department of Computer Science formally kicked off during their DLS in the fall semester with many notable people in the field sharing their research with faculty and students. Professor Vardi’s talk is titled The Automated-Reasoning Revolution: From Theory to Practice and Back.

Vardi will cover research topics such as Boolean satisfiability, software advancements of the past two decades, and the Satisfiability Modulo Theory. According to Professor Vardi, recent work in his area of specialization has challenged the long standing mindset among computer scie  ntists that NP-complete problems are intractable. Although this is particularly exciting for anyone with knowledge in this field, the talk will be of interest to anybody with general computer science knowledge, as well.

Professor Vardi is originally from Israel, where he received his PhD in Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981. He managed the Mathematics and Related Computer Science Department at the IBM Almaden Research Center in California before joining Rice University in 1993 and becoming the chair of their Computer Science Department only one year later. Professor Vardi has won numerous prestigious awards from around the globe, including three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, the 2008 ACM Presidential Award, and honorary doctorates from universities in Germany and France.

Everyone is welcome to join us for Professor Vardi’s talk at 2:30p on February 24 in Room 120 of the New Computer Science building.