Joseph Yehuda Halpern (born 1953) is an Israeli-American professor of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

. Most of his research is on reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty.

Biography

Halpern graduated in 1975 from

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

with a B.S. in mathematics. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 1981 under the supervision of

Albert R. Meyer Albert Ronald da Silva Meyer (born 1941) is Hitachi America Professor emeritus of computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Biography Meyer received his PhD from Harvard University in 1972 in applied mathematics, under the ...

and

Gerald Sacks Gerald Enoch Sacks (1933 – October 4, 2019) was a logician whose most important contributions were in recursion theory. Named after him is Sacks forcing, a forcing notion based on perfect sets and the Sacks Density Theorem, which asserts that t ...

. He has written three books, ''Actual Causality'', ''Reasoning about Uncertainty,'' and ''Reasoning About Knowledge'' and is a winner of the 1997

Gödel Prize The Gödel Prize is an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, given jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Inter ...

in theoretical computer science and the 2009

Dijkstra Prize The Edsger W. Dijkstra Paper Prize in Distributed Computing is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at lea ...

in distributed computing. From 1997 to 2003 he was editor-in-chief of the

Journal of the ACM The ''Journal of the ACM'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering computer science in general, especially theoretical aspects. It is an official journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. Its current editor-in-chief is Venkatesan ...

. In 2002 he was inducted as a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

and in 2012 he was selected as an

IEEE Fellow As of 2019, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 5,082 members designated Fellow, each of whom is associated with one of the 41 societies under the IEEE. The Fellow grade of membership is the highest level of membershi ...

. In 2011 he was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the Zukunftskolleg at the

University of Konstanz The University of Konstanz (german: Universität Konstanz) is a university in the city of Konstanz in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Its main campus was opened on the Gießberg in 1972 after being founded in 1966. The university is Germany's ...

. In 2019, Halpern was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

for methods of reasoning about knowledge, belief, and uncertainty and their applications to distributed computing and multiagent systems. Halpern is also the administrator for the Computing Research Repository, the computer science branch of

arXiv.org arXiv (pronounced "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of sc ...

, and the moderator for the "general literature" and "other" subsections of the repository. His students include

Nir Friedman Nir Friedman (born 1967) is an Israeli Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research combines Machine Learning and Statistical Learning with Systems Biology, specifically in the fields of Gene Regul ...

Daphne Koller Daphne Koller ( he, דפנה קולר; born August 27, 1968) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She was a professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient. She is one o ...

, and

Yoram Moses Yoram Moses ( he, יוֹרָם מוֹזֶס) is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Yoram Moses received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981, and ...

References

External links

Joe Halpern's homepageGoogle scholar profile
Cornell University faculty Gödel Prize laureates 20th-century American Jews Dijkstra Prize laureates Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellow Members of the IEEE American computer scientists Researchers in distributed computing University of Toronto alumni Harvard University alumni Artificial intelligence researchers Living people 1953 births IBM Research computer scientists IBM employees 21st-century American Jews {{Compu-bio-stub