Rajeev Alur is an American professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked on formal methods, programming languages, and automata theory. He is known for introducing timed automata (Alur and Dill, 1994) and nested words (Alur and Madhusudan, 2004).
Professor Alur was born in Pune. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1987 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1991. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, he worked at the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories. His research includes formal modeling and analysis of reactive systems, hybrid systems, model checking, software verification, design automation for embedded software, and program synthesis. He is a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE. He has also served as the chair of ACM SIGBED (Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems). Since 2003, he has held the title of Zisman Family Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Awards and honors
- Received a CAREER award from the US National Science Foundation.
- Won the 2008 Computer Aided Verification Award for important work in the theory of real-time systems verification (with David Dill).
- Received the 2010 LICS (IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science) Test-of-Time award for the 1990 paper titled "Model-checking for real-time systems" (with David Dill and Costas Courcoubetis).
- Shared the 2016 Alonzo Church Award with David Dill for inventing timed automata, a model used to study real-time systems that is both theoretically strong and widely useful in practice.
- Received the 2024 Knuth Prize for making important contributions to the basics of computer science by creating new models of computation that help in analyzing, designing, building, and verifying computer systems.