Distinguished Lecture Series on AI

Patrick Cousot received the Doctor Engineer degree in Computer Science and the Doctor ès Sciences degree in Mathematics from the Grenoble Alps University, France.

Patrick Cousot is Silver Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, USA.

Before he was Professor at the the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France, the École Polytechnique and the University of Lorraine and a Research Scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research at the University Joseph Fourier of Grenoble, France.

Patrick Cousot is the inventor, with Radhia Cousot, of Abstract Interpretation.
Patrick Cousot was awarded the Silver Medal of the CNRS (1999), a honorary doctorate from the Fakultät Mathematik und Informatik of the Universität des Saarlandes (2001), the Grand Prix of Computer Science and its Applications of the Fondation Airbus Group attributed by the French Academy of Sciences (2006), a Humboldt Research Award (2008), and, with Radhia Cousot, the ACM-SIPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award (2013), the IEEE Harlan D. Mills Joint Award (2014), and the IEEE John Von Neumann Medal (2018) ``For introducing abstract interpretation, a powerful framework for automatically calculating program properties with broad application to verification and optimization'', a doctorate ``Ad Honorem'' in Computer Science by the Ca' Foscari University of Venice (2020), Fellow of the ACM “For contributions to programming languages through the invention and development of abstract interpretation” (2020). He is Member of the Academia Europaæ, Informatics section (since 2006).

Dr. Charles Isbell received his bachelor's in Information and Computer Science from Georgia Tech, and his MS and PhD at MIT's AI Lab. Upon graduation, he worked at AT&T Labs/Research until 2002, when he returned to Georgia Tech to join the faculty as an Assistant Professor. He has served many roles since returning and is now The John P. Imlay Jr. Dean of the College of Computing.

Charles’s research interests are varied but the unifying theme of his work has been using machine learning to build autonomous agents who engage directly with humans. His work has been featured in the popular press, congressional testimony, and in several technical collections.

In parallel, Charles has also pursued reform in computing education. He was a chief architect of Threads, Georgia Tech’s structuring principle for computing curricula. Charles was also an architect for Georgia Tech’s First-of-its’s-kind MOOC-supported MS in Computer Science. Both efforts have received international attention, and been presented in the academic and popular press.

In all his roles, he has continued to focus on issues of broadening participation in computing, and is the founding Executive Director for the Constellations Center for Equity in Computing. He is an AAAI Fellow and a Fellow of the ACM. Appropriately, his citation for ACM Fellow reads “for contributions to interactive machine learning; and for contributions to increasing access and diversity in computing”.