Prof. Jayadev Misra
(BT/EE/1969)
Jayadev Misra (born October 17,1947) holds the title of Schlumberger Centennial Chair Emeritus in Computer Science and University Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus, at the University of Texas at Austin. He is widely recognized for his lasting contributions to formal methods in concurrent and distributed computing.
Education & Career
Misra earned his B.Tech. from IIT Kanpur in 1969, followed by a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Johns Hopkins University in 1972. After a brief stint at IBM, he joined the University of Texas at Austin in 1974, spending his entire academic career there- aside from a sabbatical at Stanford in 1983-84- until retiring from teaching in September 2015.
Research Contributions
Misra is known especially for co-designing the UNITY formalism with K. Mani Chandy. UNITY provided one of the first elegant frameworks for reasoning about concurrent programs, complete with proof rules for invariance and leads-to properties. In collaboration with Chandy, he also pioneered the Chandy-Misra conservative algorithm for distributed discrete-event simulation, a foundational method in parallel and distributed systems (independently developed by Randy Bryant).
He and Chandy made fundamental contributions in resource allocation (e.g. the drinking philosophers problem), distributed deadlock detection, graph algorithms, and knowledge in distributed systems. Misra and David Gries introduced one of the earliest algorithms for the "heavy hitters" problem, and he helped establish key axioms for linearizability in concurrent memory access.
More recently Misra designed Orc, a concurrent, nondeterministic programming language intended to orchestrate distributed computations with control over timeouts, priorities, and failures. Orc provides a mathematical basis for composing web services and distributed components using a small set of concurrency primitives. He had joined with Sir Tony Hoare of Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, in leading the Verified Software Initiative, which aims to scale program verification to large, real-world software systems.
Distinguished Alumnus Award
Prof. Jayadev Misra received the distinguished alumnus award from IIT Kanpur in 2014 for his outstanding contributions in the field of computer science and engineering, especially in the area of concurrent programming.
Public Service
Prof. Misra has been active in promoting research-oriented activities in computer science in India. He was one of the founders of a winter School in computer science at Pune, funded by Tata Research and Development, where young researchers from India and the neighbouring countries were educated by a number of internationally prominent researchers. With the help of Mr. Narayana Murthy of Infosys, he established the Mysore Park series of workshops that brings together professional researchers from India and abroad in week-long workshops on dedicated topics in computer science.
- Member, U.S. National Academy of Engineering, 2018.
- IEEE Harry H. Goode Memorial Award, jointly with K. Mani Chandy, 2017.
- Distinguished Alumnus Award, IIT Kanpur, 2014.
- Member, the Academy of Distinguished Teachers, The University of Texas, Austin, 2009.
- Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award, The University of Texas, 2010.
- Fellow, Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), 1995.
- Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 1992.
- Fellow, International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), 2023.
- Honorary doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) from Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan, 2010.
- Guggenheim Fellow, 1988.
- Identified as a "highly cited researcher" by Thomson Reuters, 2004.
- Strachey Memorial Lecturer, Oxford University, 1996.
- Belgian FNRS International chair of computer science, 1990.