This award supports the Amir Pnueli Memorial Symposium, held May 8-9, 2010 at New York University. The symposium brings together scientists from around the world in a retrospective and prospective on the use of logics, particularly temporal logic, in computer science. Amir Pnueli received the Turing Award for his seminal work in temporal logics and computer science. The symposium provides a singular opportunity for faculty, students, and industrial researchers to hear from researchers who are shaping the future of their fields. It is open to all who wish to attend, and video recordings of the talks are made available online for those who are unable to attend in person.
?Amir Pnueli was one of the most influential computer scientists of our time. He published more than 250 papers, many of them groundbreaking, including the 1977 paper, The Temporal Logic of Programs for which he won the 1996 ACM Turing Award, the highest honor that can be received by a computer scientist. On November 2, 2009, he unexpectedly passed away. His loss was and is felt deeply by friends and colleagues around the world. The Amir Pnueli Memorial Symposium, held at New York University on May 8-9, 2010, convened a highly distinguished set of invited speakers (including Turing award winner Allen Emerson) to revisit and build upon the ideas which inspired and defined his life's work. The event was free and open to all interested participants and was advertised widely. Over 100 participants attended the event in person, including researchers and students in academia and industry from all over the world. Because many more people were interested in the content of the symposium than were able to attend in person, all of the talks were videotaped and are now available on a permanent website which also includes links to the speakers' slides. The website is www.cs.nyu.edu/acsys/pnueli. This website a legacy that we expect will be an invaluable resource for students and practitioners looking to gain perspective, depth, and a sense of the state-of-the-art in formal methods. The content of the symposium was unusual and exceptional, both in terms of the quality of the speakers and the range and depth of topics covered. At least one student was inspired to pursue new ideas based on the talks. Several eminent speakers commented on the value provided by the different perspectives offered during the symposium. One of them even went so far as to say that the format of the symposium should be studied and copied as a template for providing deep and crosscutting understanding of a specific area in Computer Science (in this case formal methods). Several of the talks were of a rather unique sort: synthesizing a large amount of work and putting it into a historical perspective (the talk by Moshe Vardi for example). These and indeed all of the talks are recommended viewing for all those with an interest in computer science, in the lives and contributions of great thinkers, or in understanding seminal moments in the history of science.
