Prakash Panangaden is an American/Canadian
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
noted for
his research in
programming language theory
Programming language theory (PLT) is a branch of computer science that deals with the design, implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of formal languages known as programming languages. Programming language theory is clos ...
,
concurrency theory
In computer science, concurrency is the ability of different parts or units of a program, algorithm, or problem to be executed out-of-order or in partial order, without affecting the outcome. This allows for parallel execution of the concur ...
,
Markov process
A Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. Informally, this may be thought of as, "What happe ...
es and
duality theory
In mathematics, a duality translates concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one fashion, often (but not always) by means of an involution operation: if the dual of is , then the du ...
.
Earlier he worked on
quantum field theory
In theoretical physics, quantum field theory (QFT) is a theoretical framework that combines classical field theory, special relativity, and quantum mechanics. QFT is used in particle physics to construct physical models of subatomic particles and ...
in curved space-time and radiation from black holes.
He is the founding Chair of the
ACM Special Interest Group on Logic and Computation (
ACM SIGLOG).
Biography
Prakash Panangaden was born in
Pune, India
Pune (; ; also known as Poona, ( the official name from 1818 until 1978) is one of the most important industrial and educational hubs of India, with an estimated population of 7.4 million As of 2021, Pune Metropolitan Region is the largest i ...
on March 11, 1954. He attended school at the
Calcutta Boys' School
The Calcutta Boys' School is an independent private day school located in Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal. was founded by the Rev. James Mills Thoburn (Methodist Missionary to India, and later Missionary Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Chur ...
, Kolkata. He received a PhD from the
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UW–Milwaukee, UWM, or Milwaukee) is a public urban research university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It is the largest university in the Milwaukee metropolitan area and a member of the University of Wiscons ...
under the supervision of
Leonard Parker.
His PhD thesis was on renormalization of interacting fields in curved spacetime.
Prakash has successfully graduated 19 students and has in total 41 academic descendants, 8 of whom are women.
He joined the Department of Computer Science at
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 ...
in 1985 as an Assistant
Professor, where he worked in the
Nuprl project and co-authored a book. He moved to
McGill University
McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Universit ...
as an associate professor in the
School of Computer Science
in 1990 and was promoted to professor in 1996.
He has been keynote speaker at many conferences, including the two top conferences in the field –
LICS and
ICALP
ICALP, the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming is an academic conference organized annually by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science and held in different locations around Europe. Like most theoret ...
.
Awards
In 2017, the Test-of-Time Award Committee consisting of
Christel Baier
Christel Baier (born 26 September 1965) is a German theoretical computer scientist known for her work in model checking, temporal logic, and automata theory. She is a professor at TU Dresden, where she holds the chair for Algebraic and Logic Fou ...
, Amy Felty (chair), Andrew Pitts and Nicole Schweikardt chose the paper ''Bisimulation for Labelled Markov Processes'' (by Richard Blute, Josee Desharnais, Abbas Edalat, Prakash Panangaden) as one of two papers from LICS 1997 that has had the most impact in the 20 years since its publication. In 2013 Prakash Panagaden was elected a
FRSC.
His citation reads:
"Prakash Panangaden's research career has spanned computer science, mathematics and physics.
He has worked on programming languages, probabilistic systems, quantum computation and relativity.
He is particularly known for deep connections between domain theory and continuous-state Markov processes
where he and his colleagues proved a striking logical characterization theorem. He and Keye Martin discovered
a remarkable way to reconstruct spacetime topology from causal structure using mathematical
ideas from programming languages."
He was honoured on his 60th birthday by his research community. There was a three-day symposium, called PrakashFest, held at Oxford University
and a Festschrift was published by Springer-Verlag.
The summary of the Festschrift reads:
"This Festschrift volume contains papers presented at a conference, Prakash Fest, held in honor of Prakash Panangaden, in Oxford, UK, in May 2014, to celebrate his 60th birthday.
Prakash Panangaden has worked on a large variety of topics including probabilistic and concurrent computation, logics and duality and quantum information and computation.
Despite the enormous breadth of his research, he has made significant and deep contributions. For example, he introduced logic and a real-valued interpretation of the logic to
capture equivalence of probabilistic processes quantitatively."
In 1999 he was awarded the Leo Yaffe Award by the Faculty of Science of
McGill University
McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Universit ...
for excellence in teaching.
In 2016 he was awarded the Principal’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching from McGill University.
In 2022 he was awarded the Class of 1890 Outstanding Teaching Award by the Faculty of Engineering, McGill University.
He is also an ACM Fellow from 2020.
In 2022 he was again awarded the prestigious LICS Test of Time Award for a 2002 joint paper written with Josée Desharnais (Laval), Vineet Gupta (Google) and Radha Jagadeesan (De Paul University). “The metric analogue of weak bisimulation for probabilistic processes” was deemed one of the two most influential papers from that year after 20 years.
[
]
References
External links
* McGill University
Prakash Panangaden, School of Computer Science
* Google Scholar
Prakash Panangaden, Google Scholar
{{DEFAULTSORT:Panangaden, Prakash
McGill University faculty
Computer scientists
Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada
Indian computer scientists
Living people
1954 births