Prof. Jayadev Misra obtained his B. Tech. degree in electrical engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1969. He joined the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore shortly after graduation and received a Ph.D. in computer science in 1972. He worked for IBM for a year and a half and then joined the computer science department at the University of Texas at Austin in 1974.
Prof. Misra's research interests are in the area of concurrent programming, with emphasis on rigorous methods to improve the programming process. He has had a long research collaboration with Prof. K. Mani Chandy, currently professor Emeritus at Cal Tech, that has resulted in a number of contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent computing. They designed an elegant concurrent programming language, called UNITY, and showed how properties of UNITY programs could be proved systematically in the same way that one proves a mathematical theorem. He has been a visiting Professor at Stanford University. Currently, he is a Professor and holder of the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in computer science at the University of Texas at Austin.
The prominent computer scientist Leslie Lamport has said: "The first major step in getting beyond traditional programming languages to describe concurrent algorithms was Misra and Chandy's Unity... Misra and Chandy developed proof rules to formalize the style of reasoning that had been developed for proving invariance and leads-to properties. Unity provided the most elegant formulation yet for these proofs."
Prof. Misra and Chandy pioneered the area of distributed simulation. The "Chandy-Misra algorithm for conservative discrete-event simulation (DES) provided an elegant solution to a very difficult problem that had thwarted previous researchers. Professor Misra's paper on discrete-event simulation has been cited more than 1000 times, according to Google scholar.
His current work on combining web services to create complex applications looks promising. He is also spear-heading an effort, jointly with Sir Tony Hoare of Microsoft research, Cambridge, to automate large-scale program verification. The goal is to push forward the state of the art of automatic software verification tools by focusing on significant and large problems that arise in practice. Formal verification is now being applied to many major corporations and government agencies.
Prof. Misra has been the past editor of several journals including: Computing Surveys, Journal of the ACM, Information processing letters and the Formal aspects of computing. He is the author of two books, Parallel program design: A Foundation, published by Addison-Wesley, 1988, co-authored with Mani Chandy, and a discipline of multiprogramming, published by Springer-Verlag, 2001.
Prof. Misra is a fellow of ACM and IEEE. He held the Guggenheim fellowship during 1988-89. He was the Strachey lecturer at Oxford University in 1996, and the holder of the belgian FNRS International chair of computer science in 1990. He was identified as a highly cited researcher by ISI, Thompson, in 2004. He received an honorary doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) from the Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan, France, in 2010. Some of the teaching recognitions he has received include election to the academy of distinguished teachers at the University of Texas at Austin in 2009 and the Regents' Outstanding teaching award of the University of Texas system in 2010.
Prof. Misra has been active in promoting research-oriented activities in computer science in India. He was one of the founders of a winter School in computer science at Pune, funded by tata research and development, where young researchers from India and the neighbouring countries were educated by a number of internationally prominent researchers. With the help of Mr. Narayana Murthy of Infosys, he established the Mysore Park series of workshops that brings together professional researchers from India and abroad in week-long workshops on dedicated topics in computer science.
Prof. Jayadev Misra is receiving the distinguished alumnus award for his outstanding contributions in the field of computer science and engineering in the area of concurrent programming.
