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Edmund M. Clarke, the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, has died of Covid-19.
Obituary: Edmund M. Clarke, CMU professor who won computer science's Nobel Prize equivalent:
Edmund M. Clarke, a professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University who won computer science's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, died Tuesday of COVID-19 after a long illness. He was 75.
[...] In the early 1980s, Mr. Clarke and his Harvard University graduate student, E. Allen Emerson — as well as Joseph Sifakis of the University of Grenoble, who was working separately — developed model checking, which has helped to improve the reliability of complex computer chips, systems and networks.
For their work, the Association for Computing Machinery gave the three scientists the prestigious A.M. Turing Award — computer science's Nobel Prize — in 2007.
Mr. Clark's citation[*] on the Turing Award website[**] said Microsoft and Intel and other companies use model checking to verify designs for computer networks and software.
"It is becoming particularly important in the verification of software designed for recent generations of integrated circuits, which feature multiple processors running simultaneously," the citation page said. "Model checking has substantially improved the reliability and safety of the systems upon which modern life depends."
Model checking allowed engineers to analyze the logic beneath a design similar to how a mathematician uses a proof to determine that a theorem is correct, according to CMU. It considers every possible state of a hardware or software design and determines if it is consistent with the designer's specifications.
Before the development of model checking, CMU said, engineers checked for logic errors in computer circuitry or software programs by running simulations to test performance as well as manually examining each line of computer code. But those methods became inadequate as computers became more complex, and errors often went undetected until after a product was released, which could be costly even when minor, according to the university.
[*] https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/clarke_1167964.cfm
[**] https://amturing.acm.org/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @05:20PM (2 children)
He was old in 2007, and emeritus by then. Obviously, he had a long term illness like cancer, and he died in the hospital with the virus, so they got to claim it as a covid death for the bonus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @07:33PM (1 child)
Automobile accidents are grossly overcounted in the same manner. For instance, those people who die in a crash on their way to the hospital for their chemo treatment, their car crash really just exasperated their underlying cancer condition and they should properly be tabulated as a cancer death.
Come to think of it, cancer deaths are overcounted too. People with cancer have old age as an underlying condition (whether they die at 9 or 90), which they were going to die of anyway, but as a bonus it gets tabulated as a cancer death.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @10:33PM
When I said bonus, I meant in the green dollars sense. Hospitals get money from the government for covid deaths. Increased cancer counts may indirectly get them donations.