On December 23, local time, James S. Clarke, director of the Intel Labs Quantum Hardware Research Group, posted an obituary on social media stating that his father, the 2007 Turing Award winner Edmund M. Clarke, died of COVID-19. He was 75 years old.
The 2007 Turing Award was awarded to three scientists, Edmund M. Clarke, E Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis, in recognition of their development of model checking technology and making it a very effective algorithm verification widely used in hardware and software industries The foundational contribution made by technology.
Edmund M. Clarke was born in 1945. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Virginia in 1967, a master's degree in mathematics from Duke University in 1968, and a PhD in computer science from Cornell University in 1976.
After that, Professor Clarke taught at Duke University for two years before joining Harvard University in 1978 as an assistant professor. In 1981, he and his doctoral student Allen Emerson first proposed the idea of model checking and used it in the verification research of automata concurrent systems, becoming one of the pioneers of model checking in formal logic research.
In 1982, he joined the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and was named a full-time tenured professor in 1989. In 1995, Clarke became the first recipient of the FORE Systems Professorship in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University; in 2008, he was named University Professor, which is Carnegie Mellon University’s highest faculty honor.
In addition, he is the co-recipient of the 1998 ACM Kanellakis Award, the 1999 Allen Newell Award for Excellence in Research, the 2004 IEEE Harry H. Goode Memorial Award and the 2008 Herbrand Award. In 2014, the Franklin Institute awarded him the Ball Award and the Scientific Achievement Award in recognition of his leadership in the conception and development of computer system verification technology.
Edmund M. Clarke married his high school girlfriend Martha W. Clarke in 1968. It is reported that the last word he said to his wife was "I love you". Due to epidemic restrictions, the memorial service will be held in a private mode, and it is planned to be broadcast live on Monday, December 28th at 2 pm local time .