[Colloq] Distinguished Speaker Series - Robert Constable, Thurs. Feb. 9

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium
Distinguished Speaker Series
Thursday, February 9, 2006
3:00 pm
Raytheon Amphitheater, Egan Research Center

Speaker:
Robert L. Constable
Cornell University

Title:
"Transforming the Academy: Knowledge Formation
  in the Age of Digital Information"

Bio:
ROBERT CONSTABLE is a graduate of Princeton University where he worked 
with Alonzo Church, one of the pioneers of computer science. He did his 
PhD at Wisconsin with Stephen Cole Kleene, a PhD student of Church and 
another pioneer of computer science.
Professor Constable joined the Cornell faculty in 1968. He has 
supervised over forty PhD students in computer science. He is known for 
his work connecting programs and mathematical proofs which has led to 
new ways of automating the production of reliable software. This work is 
known by the slogan "proofs as programs," and it is embodied in the 
Nuprl ("new pearl") theorem prover. He has written three books on this 
topic as well as numerous research articles. Since 1980 he has headed a 
project that uses Nuprl to design and verify software systems, instances 
of which are still operational in industry and science. Currently he is 
working on extending this programming method to concurrent processes, 
realizing the notion of "proofs as processes."
In 1999 he became the first dean of the Faculty of Computing and 
Information Science, a unit which includes the Computer Science 
Department, as well as Information Science, Statistics, Computational 
Biology, Graphics, and Computational Science. Dean Constable was the 
department chair of Computer Science from 1993 to 1999.