Joseph Halpern

Joseph Halpern received a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1975 and a PhD in mathematics from Harvard in 1981. In between, he spent 2 years as the head of the Mathematics Department at Bawku Secondary School, in Ghana. Ater a year as a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he joined the IBM Almaden Research Center in 1982, where he remained until 1996, also serving as a consulting professor at Stanford. In 1996, he joined the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where he is currently the Joseph C. Ford Professor and was department chair from 2010 to 2014. Halpern's major research interests are in reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, security, distributed computation, decision theory, and game theory. Together with his former student, Yoram Moses, he pioneered the approach of applying reasoning about knowledge to analyzing distributed protocols and multi-agent systems. He has coauthored five patents, three books (Reasoning About Knowledge, MIT Press 2003; Reasoning about Uncertainty, MIT Press 2003; and Actual Causality, MIT Press 2016), and over 360 technical publications. Halpern is a Fellow of the AAAI, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ACM, IEEE, the Game Theory Society, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET). Among other awards, he received the Kampe de Feriet Award in 2016, the ACMSIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2011, the Dijkstra Prize in 2009, the ACM/AAAI Newell Award in 2008, and the Godel Prize in 1997, and was a Guggenheim Fellow from 2001 to 2002, and a Fulbright Fellow from 2001 to 2002 and 2009 to 2010. Two of his papers have won best-paper prizes at the IJCAI (1985 and 1991), and another two received best-paper awards at the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Conference (2006 and 2012). He was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM (1997-2003) and has been program chair of a number of conferences, including the Symposium on Theory in Computing (STOC), Logic in Computer Science (LICS), UAI, Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), and Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK). He started and continues to be the administrator of CoRR, the computer science section of arxiv.org.