This year’s Salomaa Prize goes to Dexter Kozen, the Joseph Newton Pew, Jr. Professor of Engineering Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to theoretical computer science.
The award will be given at the Developments in Language Theory (DLT) international conference, held June 30 - July 3, in Rouen, France.
The Salomaa Prize is named after Arto Salomaa, a Finnish mathematician and computer scientist who was one of the founding fathers of automata theory – the study of abstract, self-propelled computing machines and the problems they can solve – and a co-founder of the DLT conference. The award consists of a diploma and cash prize sponsored by Salomaa’s academic home, the University of Turku.
"I'm deeply honored to be chosen for this award named for Professor Salomaa, as he has been one of my greatest heroes for many years," Kozen said. "His work on algebraic automata theory has had a profound influence on my own."
Kozen is being honored for “his exceptional and fundamental achievements and his broad impact on the theory of automata, formal languages, logic, complexity theory, and software verification, especially for his contributions to Kleene algebras, alternating machines, dynamic logics, computational algebra, [and] complexity of algebras,” according to a statement from the University of Turku. During his distinguished career, Kozen has authored more than 200 research articles and four books.
In addition to this latest honor, he is a former Guggenheim fellow and a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the European Association of Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). He is a recipient of the John G. Kemeny Prize in Computing, an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award, the EATCS Award, the IEEE W. Wallace McDowell Award, and the ACM Alonzo Church Award.
Patricia Waldron is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.