Joseph Y. Halpern

Joe Halpern was born in Israel, and emigrated to Canada at the age of four. He received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1975 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard in 1981. In between, he spent two years as the head of the Mathematics Department at Bawku Secondary School, in Ghana.

After a year as a visiting scientist at MIT, he joined the IBM Almaden

Research Center in 1982. In 1996, he moved to Cornell University, where he is a professor in Computer Science and (as of July, 2010) the department chair.

He has received a number of awards: the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2011, the Dijkstra Prize (joint with Yoram Moses) in 2009, the

ACM/AAAI Newell Award in 2008, the Godel Prize (joint with Yoram Moses) in 1997, the Publishers' Prize for Best Paper at at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1985 and in 1989, a best paper award at the Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in 2006 and 2012, and two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards. He is a Fellow of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). He was editor-in-chief of Journal of the ACM, and has served as an editor for many other journals.

Besides all the academics, Halpern likes to write music, travel, read, and hang out with his kids. He lives in Ithaca, New York.