2005 Association for Computing Machinery Award - ACM HONORS PIONEERS OF VERIFICATION TOOLS FOR SAFE, SECURE SOFTWARE
March 2006
Robert S. Boyer, Professor
Matt Kaufmann, Senior Research Scientist
J Strother Moore, Professor and
Adm. Inman Chair in Computing Theory
Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin
"For pioneering and engineering a most effective theorem prover (named the Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover) as a formal methods tool for verifying safety-critical hardware and software.' - ACM
(full ACM press release)
'Software System Award Recognizes Technology for Safety-Critical Uses'
STOC 2006 Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award Goes To UT Student, Anup Rao
February 2006
Anup Rao, Graduate Student Assistant
Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin
Anup received his undergraduate degree in Math and Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2002. He started his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 2003 under David Zuckerman. His interests are in the role of randomness in computation. He expects to graduate in 2007.
'Randomness is essential for the security of many cryptographic protocols, yet it is difficult to obtain high-quality randomness. Anup Rao showed how to extract high-quality randomness from several independent low-quality random sources. Using elegant techniques, he was able to substantially reduce the input randomness requirement. In particular, each n-bit low-quality random source need only contain $n^{\Omega(1)}$ bits of randomness, rather than the $\Omega(n)$ known previously.'
~David Zuckerman, Professor, Department of Computer Sciences, UT Austin
