Gerard Holzmann

Gerard J. Holzmann (* 1951 in Amsterdam ) is a Dutch computer scientist.

Holzmann 2006

Holzmann studied computer science at the TU Delft with a diploma in 1976 and received his doctorate there in 1979 under WL van der Poel and JL de Kroes ( coordination problems in multiprocessing systems ). As a post-doctoral student he was employed by Per Brinch Hansen in Los Angeles as a Fulbright scholar and in 1980/81 at Bell Laboratories . There he remained (except for a time as assistant professor in Delft from 1981 to 1983) until 2003. From 1995 he was Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs and from 2001 Director of Computer Principles Research . From 2003 he was a senior computer scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and a senior scientist in the software reliability laboratory. He was also in the computer science faculty at Caltech .

In the 1980s he developed the SPIN Model Checker at Bell Labs to verify the correctness of distributed software. SPIN stands for Simple Promela Interpreter , where Promela (Process or Protocol Meta Language) stands for a description language. SPIN has been freely available since 1991.

In 2012 he received an Exceptional Engineering Achievement Award from NASA and in 2009 the Space Act Award from NASA. He became an ACM Fellow in 2012 and a Fellow of the JPL in 2007 and a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering in 2005 . In 2006 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Twente. In 2005 he received the Paris Kanellakis Prize with others and in 2001 the ACM Software System Award .

Fonts

• The Spin Model Checker - Primer and Reference Manual , Addison-Wesley, 2003
• Design and Validation of Computer Protocols , Prentice Hall, 1991.
• The Early History of Data Networks , IEEE Computer Society Press, 1995.
• Beyond Photography - The Digital Darkroom , Prentice Hall, 1988 (the book coined the term Digital Darkroom for photo editing with computers)

Web links

• Homepage