Algorithmics : The Spirit of Computing

David Harel has been at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel since 1980. He was Department Head from 1989 to 1995, and was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science between 1998 and 2004. He was also co-founder of I-Logix, Inc. He received his PhD from MIT in 1978, and has spent time at IBM Yorktown Heights, 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, automata, database theory), and he now works mainly on software and systems engineering and on modeling biological systems. He is the inventor of statecharts and co-inventor of live sequence charts, and co-designed Statemate, Rhapsody, the Play-Engine and PlayGo. Among his awards are the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (1992), the Israel Prize (2004), the ACM Software System Award (2007), the Emet Prize (2010), and three honorary degrees. He is a Fellow of the ACM, the IEEE and the AAAS, and a member of the Academia Europaea and the Israel Academy of Sciences.

Yishai Feldman received his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1986.  He was a faculty member at Tel Aviv University and the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. He is now at the IBM Research lab in Haifa, Israel, where he leads research on tools for program understanding and transformation.