Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) will award an honorary doctorate to professor David Harel during its Dies Natalis (Foundation Day) celebration on 27 April. Harel is a pioneer in the field of computer science. For example most software and system engineers around the world use his Statecharts visual modeling technique. David Harel currently fulfills The William Sussman Endowed Chair as Professor of Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

As well as working on Statecharts, David Harel has also worked on a wide range of other problems. He was for example the first to develop a practical method to digitize and electronically communicate scents.
A sniffer or electronic nose transforms the scent into a digital ‘fingerprint’ which can then be used to reproduce the same scent at a different time and place, based on several dozen basic compounds or odorants.

Behavioral programming
Harel has also made a number of contributions in the past 30 years to bridging the gap between informal system descriptions and executable programs. He regards it as a big challenge to strip system development of the limitations of classical programming methods. This is why he developed Life Sequence Charts (LSCs), which allow the desired behavior to be achieved on the basis of typical scenarios, which allow information systems to be created without the need to write programs. Nowadays this is referred to as Behavioral Programming, a fast-growing field of computer science.

Theory and concrete systems
Professor Harel completed his Master’s thesis at Tel Aviv University, supervised by Turing Award winner Amir Pnueli. Harel then gained his doctorate in record time (only 20 months) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since 1980 he has worked at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, where he held the positions of department head and dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science for a number of years. In his research David Harel makes strong links between theoretical results and the creation of concrete systems, which means his work is an excellent match for the engineering focus of TU/e. Harel has authored eight influential books and won numerous prestigious awards, including three honorary doctorates. TU/e is delighted that David Harel has accepted the TU/e honorary doctorate. Honorary tutor will be prof. Wil van der Aalst of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at TU/e.

Symposium
TU/e will honor David Harel with a symposium on 26 April entitled ‘Pioneers of Computer Science: from Turing to Harel’. In his keynote speech David Harel will talk about the relationship between his research and that of Alan Turing, considered by many to be the founder of modern computer science. Harel regards much of his own work as a continuation of that of Turing.