by Patrick Kurp
Special to Rice News
For the 10th time, Moshe Vardi, University Professor at Rice and an expert in computational logic, artificial intelligence and databases, has been awarded an honorary title by a university outside the United States, this time by the University of Calabria, Italy.
Vardi was recognized for his research “long in duration, broad in the diversity of the topics covered and literally full of propositions of original and innovative ideas [that have had] a very significant and very beneficial influence on the development of research in computer science in the last 30 years.”
In May, the Italian university will formally award Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice, an honoris causa master’s degree in computer engineering.
Vardi’s research interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite model theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems and computer-aided verification and reasoning.
Vardi earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1981. After two tenures as a research scientist for IBM Research and continued work at Stanford University, Vardi joined the Rice faculty in 1993.
He has authored or co-authored more than 700 technical papers and, according to Google Scholar, has been cited 59,882 times and has an h-score of 119. He is senior editor of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) after serving as its editor-in-chief for a decade.
Among his honors are membership in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea. Vardi is a fellow of the ACM, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Mathematical Society.
Last year, Vardi was elected a Foreign Member of the United Kingdom’s Royal Society.
The University of Calabria cited Vardi for “the importance of the activity [he] has carried out and continues to carry out, with great ethical rigour, of critical analysis of the impact of technologies and their governance on the development of our society and the work of dissemination, scrupulous and attentive, which he intended to accompany this analysis.
“His activity has gone beyond the boundaries of the traditional scientific field in which his research has been placed, influencing different areas of knowledge and indicating new paths for reading phenomena with a high social impact.”