Keynote Speakers of SSS 2016

Hagit AttitaHagit Attiya
(Technion, Israel)

Hagit Attiya is a professor at the department of Computer Science at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and holds the Harry W. Labov and Charlotte Ullman Labov Academic Chair. Since October 2015, she is the Executive Vice-President for Academic Affairs  of the Technion. Her research interests are distributed and concurrent computing. She is the editor-in-chief of Springer’s journal Distributed Computing and a fellow of the ACM.

She received the B.Sc. degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in 1981, the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in 1983 and 1987, respectively. Before joining the Technion, she has been a post-doctoral research associate at M.I.T.

 

Joseph HalpernJoseph Halpern
(Cornell University, USA)

Joseph Halpern received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1975 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard in 1981.  In between, he spent two years as the head of the Mathematics Department at Bawku Secondary School, in Ghana. After a year as a visiting scientist at MIT, he joined the IBM Almaden Research Center in 1982, where he remained until 1996, also serving as a consulting professor at Stanford.  In 1996, he joined the CS Department at Cornell, and was department chair 2010-14.

Halpern’s major research interests are in reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, security, distributed computation, decision theory, and game theory.   Together with his former student, Yoram Moses, he pioneered the approach of applying reasoning about knowledge to analyzing distributed protocols and multi-agent systems.  He has coauthored 6 patents, two books (“Reasoning About Knowledge” and “Reasoning about Uncertainty”), and over 300 technical publications.

Halpern is a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ACM, IEEE, and SEAT (Society for the  Advancement of Economic Theory).  Among other awards, he received the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2011, the Dijkstra Prize in 2009, the ACM/AAAI Newell Award in 2008, the Godel Prize in 1997, was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001-02, and a Fulbright Fellow in 2001-02 and 2009-10. Two of his papers have won best-paper prizes at IJCAI (1985 and 1991), and another two received best-paper awards at the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Conference (2006 and 2012).   He was  editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM (1997-2003) and has been program chair of a number of conferences, including the Symposium on Theory in Computing (STOC), Logic in Computer Science (LICS), Uncertainty in AI (UAI), Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), and Theoretical Aspects

Maurice HerlihyMaurice Herlihy
(Brown University, USA)

Maurice Herlihy has an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. He has served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, on the staff of DEC Cambridge Research Lab, and is currently a professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. He is the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, the 2004 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science, the 2008 ISCA influential paper award, the 2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, and the 2013 Wallace McDowell award. He received a 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Natural Sciences and Engineering Lecturing Fellowship, and he is fellow of the ACM, a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.