Jayadev Misra

Summary

Jayadev Misra is an Indian-born computer scientist who has spent most of his professional career in the United States. He is the Schlumberger Centennial Chair Emeritus in computer science and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Professionally he is known for his contributions to the formal aspects of concurrent programming and for jointly spearheading, with Sir Tony Hoare, the project on Verified Software Initiative (VSI).

Jayadev Misra
Born(1947-10-17)October 17, 1947
India
CitizenshipUS
Alma mater
Known forContributions in formal aspects of distributed and concurrent computing, in particular, projects Unity and Orc.
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
Institutions
ThesisA Study of Strategies for Multistage Testing (1972)
Doctoral advisorHarlan Mills
Website"Jayadev Misra".
Notes
Jayadev Misra at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

Education and early career edit

Misra received a B.Tech. in electrical engineering from IIT Kanpur, India in 1969 and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland in 1972. After a brief period working for IBM, he joined the University of Texas at Austin in 1974 where he has remained throughout his career, except for a sabbatical year spent at Stanford University during 1983–1984. He retired from active teaching in 2015.

Major professional contributions edit

Misra and K. Mani Chandy have made a number of important contributions in the area of concurrent computing. They developed a programming notation and a logic, called UNITY, to describe concurrent computations. Leslie Lamport says: "The first major step in getting beyond traditional programming languages to describe concurrent algorithms was Misra and Chandy's Unity"[1] and "Misra and Chandy developed proof rules to formalize the style of reasoning that had been developed for proving invariance and leads-to properties. Unity provided the most elegant formulation yet for these proofs."[2]

Misra and Chandy (and, independently, Randy Bryant) have developed a conservative algorithm for distributed discrete-event simulation, which is now commonly used in a variety of areas. They also developed a number of fundamental algorithms for resource allocation (the drinking philosophers problem), deadlock detection, graph algorithms, and a theory of knowledge transmission in distributed systems. In collaboration with David Gries, Misra proposed the first algorithm for the heavy-hitters problem. Misra proposed a set of axioms for concurrent memory access that underlie the theory of linearizability.

Misra's most recent research project, called Orc,[3] attempts to develop an algebra of concurrent computing that will help integrate different pieces of software for concurrent execution.

Awards and honors edit

Selected publications edit

  • Effective Theories in Programming Practice, ACM Books, 2023
  • Parallel Program Design - a Foundation (with K.M. Chandy), 1988[12]
  • Distributed discrete-event simulation, 1986[13]
  • Proofs of networks of processes (with Mani Chandy), 1981[14]
  • Distributed deadlock detection (with Mani Chandy and Laura M. Haas), 1983[15]
  • The drinking philosophers problem (with Mani Chandy), 1984[16]
  • Finding repeated elements (with David Gries), 1982[17]
  • How processes learn (with Mani Chandy), 1985[18]
  • The Orc Programming Language (with D. Kitchin, A. Quark, and W. Cook), 2009[19]
  • Axioms for memory access in asynchronous hardware systems, 1986[20]
  • Powerlist: A structure for parallel recursion, 1994[21]
  • Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments Vision of a Grand Challenge Project (with Tony Hoare), 2008[22]

References edit

  1. ^ Lamport, Leslie (May 1994). The Temporal Logic of Actions (Technical report) (ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 16 ed.). Microsoft. 79.
  2. ^ Lamport, Leslie (1994). "Verification and specification of concurrent programs". Distributed Systems, Methods and Tools for Specification. An Advanced Course. A Decade of Concurrency Reflections and Perspectives. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Vol. 803. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. p. 352. doi:10.1007/3-540-58043-3_23.
  3. ^ "Orc Language".
  4. ^ "IFIP Announces 2023 Awards". IFIP. 26 October 2023. Archived from the original on 2023-11-03. Retrieved 2023-11-03.
  5. ^ "NAE Website - Dr. Jayadev Misra". NAE. Retrieved 2023-11-03.
  6. ^ "Docteur Honoris Causa ENS-PARIS-SACLAY".
  7. ^ "Two UTCS Faculty Among the Most Highly Cited Researchers | Department of Computer Science". Computer Science Department, UT Austin. Archived from the original on 2015-12-25. Retrieved 2023-11-03.
  8. ^ "ACM Fellows". ACM. Retrieved 2023-11-03.
  9. ^ "IEEE Fellows Directory - Chronological Listing". IEEE. Retrieved 2023-11-03.
  10. ^ "Past Distinguished Alumnus Awardees (DAA)". IIT Kanpur. Retrieved 2023-11-03.
  11. ^ "Members - TAMEST (The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas)". TAMEST. Archived from the original on 2023-10-18. Retrieved 2023-11-03.
  12. ^ Chandy, K. Mani; Misra, Jayadev (1988). Parallel Program Design - a Foundation. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-05866-6.
  13. ^ Misra, Jayadev (March 1986). "Distributed discrete-event simulation". ACM Computing Surveys. 18 (1): 39–65. doi:10.1145/6462.6485. S2CID 18130323.
  14. ^ Misra, Jayadev; Chandy, K. Mani (July 1981). "Proofs of networks of processes". IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. SE-7 (4): 417–426. doi:10.1109/TSE.1981.230844. S2CID 15624919.
  15. ^ Chandy, K. Mani; Misra, Jayadev; Haas, LAURA M. (May 1983). "Distributed deadlock detection". ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 1 (2): 144–156. doi:10.1145/357360.357365. S2CID 9147318.
  16. ^ Chandy, K. Mani; Misra, Jayadev (October 1984). "The drinking philosophers problem". ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. 6 (4): 632–646. doi:10.1145/1780.1804. S2CID 5922362.
  17. ^ Gries, David; Misra, Jayadev (November 1982). "Finding repeated elements". Science of Computer Programming. 2 (2): 143–152. doi:10.1016/0167-6423(82)90012-0. hdl:1813/6345.
  18. ^ Chandy, K. Mani; Misra, Jayadev (August 1985). How processes learn. PODC 85: Proceedings of the fourth annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing. Minaki, Ontario, Canada: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 204–214. doi:10.1145/323596.323615.
  19. ^ Kitchin, David; Quark, Adrian; Cook, William; Misra, Jayadev (2009). "The Orc Programming Language". In David Lee; Antónia Lopes; Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter (eds.). Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Formal Techniques for Distributed Systems, Joint 11th IFIP WG 6.1. Vol. 5522. Springer Verlag. pp. 204–214. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-02138-1_1.
  20. ^ Misra, Jayadev (January 1986). "Axioms for memory access in asynchronous hardware systems". ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. 8 (1): 142–153. doi:10.1145/5001.5007. S2CID 1326311.
  21. ^ Misra, Jayadev (November 1994). "Powerlist: A structure for parallel recursion". ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. 16 (6): 1737–1767. doi:10.1145/197320.197356. S2CID 2913474.
  22. ^ Hoare, Tony; Misra, Jayadev (2008). "Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments Vision of a Grand Challenge Project". In B. Meyer, J. Woodcock (ed.). Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments. VSTTE 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 4171. Springer Verlag. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-69149-5_1.