Randal E. Bryant

Prof. Bryant has been on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon since 1984, starting as an Assistant Professor and progressing to his current rank of University Professor of Computer Science. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

Much of Dr. Bryant's research has focused on methods for formally verifying digital hardware, and more recently some forms of software. His 1986 paper on symbolic Boolean manipulation using Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) has one of the highest citation count of any publication in the computer science literature. More recently, he has become interested in the opportunities and challenges presented by computer systems working with very large data sets.

Dr. Bryant has received widespread recognition for his work. He is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, as well as a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His awards include the 2007 IEEE Piore Award, the 1997 ACM Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award (shared with Edmund M. Clarke, Ken McMillan, and Allen Emerson) for contributing to the development of symbolic model checking, as well as the 1989 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize for the best paper appearing in any IEEE publication during the preceding year. In the field of electronic design automation, he has won both the IEEE/CEDA Phil Kaufman Award and the ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton technical impact award.