Prakash Panangaden

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Prakash Panangaden
Panangaden in 2014
Born(1954-03-11)March 11, 1954
Pune, Maharashtra, India
NationalityAmerican/Canadian
Alma materIIT Kanpur
University of Chicago
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
University of Utah
Known forMarkov processes, programming language theory, concurrency theory and quantum field theory in curved space-time
Spouse
​
(died 2019)​
[1]
AwardsFellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2013)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science, Physics
InstitutionsCornell University, McGill University
Doctoral advisorLeonard Parker
Websitewww.cs.mcgill.ca/~prakash

Prakash Panangaden is an American/Canadian computer scientist noted for his research in programming language theory, concurrency theory, Markov processes and duality theory. Earlier he worked on quantum field theory in curved space-time and radiation from black holes. He is the founding Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Logic and Computation (ACM SIGLOG).[2]

Biography

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Prakash Panangaden was born in Pune, India on March 11, 1954. He attended school at the Calcutta Boys' School, Kolkata. He received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee under the supervision of Leonard Parker.[3] His PhD thesis was on renormalization of interacting fields in curved spacetime.[4]

Prakash has successfully graduated 19 students and has in total 41 academic descendants, 8 of whom are women.[5]

He joined the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University in 1985 as an Assistant Professor, where he worked in the Nuprl project and co-authored a book.[6] He moved to McGill University as an associate professor in the School of Computer Science in 1990 and was promoted to professor in 1996.[7]

He has been keynote speaker at many conferences, including the two top conferences in the field – LICS[8] and ICALP.[9]

Awards

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In 2017, the Test-of-Time Award Committee consisting of Christel Baier, Amy Felty (chair), Andrew Pitts and Nicole Schweikardt chose the paper Bisimulation for Labelled Markov Processes (by Richard Blute, Josee Desharnais, Abbas Edalat, Prakash Panangaden) as one of two papers from LICS 1997 that has had the most impact in the 20 years since its publication.[10] In 2013 Prakash Panagaden was elected a FRSC.[11] His citation reads: "Prakash Panangaden's research career has spanned computer science, mathematics and physics. He has worked on programming languages, probabilistic systems, quantum computation and relativity. He is particularly known for deep connections between domain theory and continuous-state Markov processes where he and his colleagues proved a striking logical characterization theorem. He and Keye Martin discovered a remarkable way to reconstruct spacetime topology from causal structure using mathematical ideas from programming languages."

He was honoured on his 60th birthday by his research community. There was a three-day symposium, called PrakashFest, held at Oxford University[12] and a Festschrift was published by Springer-Verlag.[13] The summary of the Festschrift reads: "This Festschrift volume contains papers presented at a conference, Prakash Fest, held in honor of Prakash Panangaden, in Oxford, UK, in May 2014, to celebrate his 60th birthday. Prakash Panangaden has worked on a large variety of topics including probabilistic and concurrent computation, logics and duality and quantum information and computation. Despite the enormous breadth of his research, he has made significant and deep contributions. For example, he introduced logic and a real-valued interpretation of the logic to capture equivalence of probabilistic processes quantitatively."

In 1999 he was awarded the Leo Yaffe Award by the Faculty of Science of McGill University for excellence in teaching.[14]

In 2016 he was awarded the Principal’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching from McGill University.[15] In 2022 he was awarded the Class of 1890 Outstanding Teaching Award by the Faculty of Engineering, McGill University.[16] He is also an ACM Fellow from 2020.[17] In 2022 he was again awarded the prestigious LICS Test of Time Award for a 2002 joint paper written with Josée Desharnais (Laval), Vineet Gupta (Google) and Radha Jagadeesan (De Paul University). “The metric analogue of weak bisimulation for probabilistic processes” was deemed one of the two most influential papers from that year after 20 years.[18]

References

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  1. ^ Lennox, R. B. (29 May 2019). "The passing of Prof. Laurie Hendren". McGill Faculty of Science.
  2. ^ Association for Computing Machinery. "SIG Governing Board". Retrieved 2015-04-05.
  3. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project. "Leonard Emanuel Parker scientific genealogy". Retrieved 2015-07-29.
  4. ^ Prakash Panangaden (1980). "Propagators and renormalization of quantum field theory in curved spacetimes". Bibcode:1980PhDT........34P. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project. "Prakash Panangaden scientific genealogy". Retrieved 2015-07-30.
  6. ^ Constable; et al. (1986). "Implementing Mathematics with The Nuprl Proof Development System". Retrieved 2015-07-30.
  7. ^ "McGill School of Computer Science: list of Faculty Members". Retrieved 2015-07-30.
  8. ^ "LICS Invited talk". LICS. Retrieved 2015-07-26.
  9. ^ "Invited Talk ICALP 2006". EATCS. Retrieved 2015-07-26.
  10. ^ Panangaden, Prakash (28 July 2017). "2017 LICS test-of-time award". ACM SIGLOG News. 4 (3): 10. doi:10.1145/3129173.3129175. S2CID 41881342.
  11. ^ Royal Society of Canada. "Class of 2013 List of New Fellows" (PDF). Retrieved 2015-04-05.
  12. ^ Department of Computer Science, Oxford University (May 23, 2014). "PrakashFest". Retrieved 2015-04-05.
  13. ^ Horizons of the Mind. A Tribute to Prakash Panangaden. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 8464. Springer-Verlag. 2014. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-06880-0. ISBN 978-3-319-06879-4. S2CID 8932348. Retrieved 2015-04-05.
  14. ^ Faculty of Science, McGill University. "Leo Yaffe Award for Excellence in Teaching". Retrieved 2015-04-05.
  15. ^ McGill University. "Principal's Prize for Excellence in Teaching". Retrieved 2022-06-30.
  16. ^ Faculty of Engineering, McGill University. "Class of 1890 Outstanding Teaching Award". Retrieved 2022-06-30.
  17. ^ Association for Computing Machinery. "ACM Fellowship". Retrieved 2022-06-30.
  18. ^ School of Computer Science, McGill University. "Professor Prakash Panangaden wins LICS Test-of-Time Award for 2022". Retrieved 2022-07-14.
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