Randal Bryant

Randal Bryant 2006

Randal E. Bryant (born October 27, 1952) is an American computer scientist and academic noted for his research on formally verifying digital hardware, and more recently some forms of software. He was also Dean of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, where he has taught since 1984.

Bryant's 1986 paper on symbolic Boolean manipulation using Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) has the highest citation count of any publication in the Citeseer database of computer science literature.^[1] In addition, he has developed several techniques to verify circuits by symbolic simulation, with levels of abstraction ranging from transistors to very high-level representations.

Bryant is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, as well as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded the 1998 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for contributing to the development of symbolic model checking, the 1989 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Paper Award for the best paper appearing in any IEEE publication during the preceding year,^[2] as well as the 2007 IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award.^[3]

In 2009 Bryant was awarded the Phil Kaufman Award by the EDA Consortium, "for his seminal technological breakthroughs in the area of formal verification."

Early life and education

Bryant was raised in Birmingham, Michigan and is the son of John H. Bryant and Barbara E. Bryant, and the grandson of William Littell Everitt, former dean of the electrical engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (1949–68). Bryant received his B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1973, and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. He was on the faculty at Caltech from 1981 to 1984.

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