Rice’s Moshe Y. Vardi elected fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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Rice’s Moshe Y. Vardi elected fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Rice University computer scientist Moshe Y. Vardi has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — one of the nation’s foremost scholarly honors.

Founded in 1780, the academy is among the oldest and most prestigious honorary societies in the country. The society’s who’s who list of current and former members includes Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and James A. Baker III, honorary chairman of Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

The 2010 class of 211 fellows and 18 foreign honorary members includes Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners and recipients of Academy and Grammy awards. The class includes actor Denzel Washington, Nobel Prize-winning economist Myron Scholes and CNN international correspondent Christiane Amanpour.

Vardi is Rice’s Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology. He has won international recognition both for his research on the application of logic to computer science and for his many contributions to the computing research community. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Vardi recently received both the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) 2010 Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award and the Computing Research Association’s 2010 Distinguished Service Award.

Vardi earned his doctorate in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981 and managed the Mathematics and Related Computer Science Department at IBM’s Almaden Research Center prior to joining Rice in 1993. His research interests include database systems, computational-complexity theory, multi-agent systems, and design specification and verification.

The academy’s 2010 class of fellows also includes film director Francis Ford Coppola, U.S. special envoy to North Korea Stephen Bosworth, actor Steve Martin, New York Times political columnist David Brooks and Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie. Foreign honorary members elected to the academy this year include playwright Mike Leigh, architect Toyo Ito and Indian industrialist Ratan Tata.

The new class of fellows will be inducted Oct. 9 in Cambridge, Mass.

More information is available at http://www.amacad.org/.