David Harel

Prof. David Harel is currently President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and has been at the Weizmann Institute of Science since 1980, serving as Department Head from 1989 to 1995, and as Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science between 1998 and 2004. He was a co-founder of I-Logix, Inc., which later became part of IBM. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978, spent two years at IBM Research, and sabbaticals at Carnegie-Mellon University, Cornell University, and the University of Edinburgh.

In the past, he worked mainly in theoretical computer science – logic, computability and automata theory – and later in software and systems engineering, modeling biological systems, the synthesis and communication of smell, and most recently on the analysis of prosody.  He is the inventor of Statecharts and co-inventor of Live Sequence Charts (LSCs), and co-designed Statemate, Rhapsody, the Play-Engine and PlayGo. Among his books are “Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing” and “Computers Ltd.: What They Really Can't Do”.

His many awards include the ICSE Best Paper Award (1988), the ACM Outstanding Educator Award (1992), ICSE Most Influential Paper Award (1998), the Israel Prize (2004), the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (2006), the ACM Software System Award (2007), the ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award (2008), and the EMET Prize (2010), as well as honorary degrees from universities in Italy, France, Israel and the Netherlands.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, AAAS and EATCS, a member of the Academia Europaea and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).

He is an ardent peace and human rights activist, and his main hobbies are photography and music.