Ed Clarke, a professor of Computer Science at CMU, just won the 2007 ACM Turing Award. The ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery and is the oldest professional group for the computing industry. I first became a member in 2005 and have maintained that membership since. The Turing Award is given in honor of Alan Turing, the father of computer science (most would agree). This award is basically the Nobel prize of computer science (since they don’t give Nobels for CS) and is meant to recognize individuals who have made a lasting and significant contribution to the computing field.
Ed’s work was in conjunction with two other people: E. Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis. Their work was on model checking, which is a way of determining whether a hardware or software structure is a model of a logical formula. So if a structure matches a formula in propositional logic, it checks.
Clarke joins three other professors at CMU who are Turing recipients. Raj Reddy was co-awarded it in 1994 for large scale AI systems. Manuel Blum won it in 1995 for his work on computational complexity theory. Dana Scott won it in 1976 for non-deterministic finite state machines, something that has a major role in natural language processing (and computational linguistics).
