Prof. Rajeev Alur is a Zisman Family Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of the much-acclaimed book Principles of Cyber-Physical Systems (MIT Press, 2015). He has served as the chair of ACM SIGBED (Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems) and as the general chair of LICS. Currently, he is leading the NSF Expeditions in Computing center ExCAPE. Honoring his academic excellence, IIT Kanpur conferred upon him the prestigious Distinguished Alumnus Award 2017. "The curriculum is challenging here, and you study with the best students. The foundation that you receive here uniquely prepares you to excel in research and join academia," said Prof. Alur, while receiving the award.
Prof. Rajeev Alur obtained his B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur in 1987 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1991. He then joined the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories as a member of the technical staff and continued working there till 1997. In Fall 1997, he joined the Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania as an Associate Professor. His areas of research include formal specification and verification of reactive systems, hybrid systems, concurrency theory and programming languages. Prof. Alur's research is aimed at improving technology for design and analysis of reliable software systems. His team is interested in developing specification logics for formalizing correctness requirements, modeling notations for constructing modular descriptions of complex systems, and verification algorithms for checking systems against requirements. His current projects include software synthesis, programming abstractions for querying streaming data, and finding performance bugs in code for parallel hardware architectures. He is leading the NSF Expeditions in Computer Augmented Program Engineering (ExCAPE) to develop synthesis tools that can assist expert programmers to discover tricky parts of the code, and/or help end-users perform simple programming tasks without having to write code. To simplify the task of programming the desired logic, they are developing StreamQRE that has constructs based on regular expressions, quantitative aggregation iterators and relational calculus.
Prof. Alur is a Fellow of the AAAS (2016), ACM (2007), IEEE (2008), Alfred P. Sloan Faculty Fellow (1999) and a Simons Investigator (2013).
