Jayadev Misra is an Indian-born computer scientist who has spent most of his professional career in the United States. He is the Schlumberger Centennial Chair Emeritus in computer science and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...

. Professionally he is known for his contributions to the formal aspects of concurrent programming and for jointly spearheading, with Sir

Tony Hoare Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (; born 11 January 1934), also known as C. A. R. Hoare, is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and ...

, the project on Verified Software Initiative (VSI).

Education and early career

Misra received a B.Tech. in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from IIT Kanpur, India in 1969 and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the

Johns Hopkins University The Johns Hopkins University (often abbreviated as Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1876 based on the European research institution model, J ...

, Baltimore, Maryland in 1972. After a brief period working for IBM, he joined the

in 1974 where he has remained throughout his career, except for a sabbatical year spent at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

during 1983–1984. He retired from active teaching in 2015.

Major professional contributions

Misra and K. Mani Chandy have made a number of important contributions in the area of concurrent computing. They developed a programming notation and a logic, called UNITY, to describe concurrent computations. Leslie Lamport says: "The first major step in getting beyond traditional programming languages to describe concurrent algorithms was Misra and Chandy's Unity" and "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." Misra and Chandy (and, independently, Randy Bryant) have developed a conservative algorithm for distributed discrete-event simulation, which is now commonly used in a variety of areas. They also developed a number of fundamental algorithms for resource allocation (the drinking philosophers problem), deadlock detection, graph algorithms, and a theory of knowledge transmission in distributed systems. In collaboration with David Gries, Misra proposed the first algorithm for the heavy-hitters problem. Misra proposed a set of axioms for concurrent memory access that underlie the theory of linearizability. Misra's most recent research project, called Orc, attempts to develop an algebra of concurrent computing that will help integrate different pieces of software for concurrent execution.

Awards and honors

* IFIP Fellow, 2023. * Member,

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

, 2018. * Harry H. Goode Memorial Award, IEEE, 2017. * Doctor Honoris Causa, École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, Cachan, France, 2010. *

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

, 1988. * Identified as a "highly cited researcher" by Thomson Reuters ISI, 2004. * ACM Fellow, 1995. *

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

Fellow, 1992. * Distinguished alumnus, IIT Kanpur,

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

, * Member, TAMEST (The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas), 2018.

Selected publications

* ''Effective Theories in Programming Practice'', ACM Books, 2023 * ''Parallel Program Design - a Foundation'' (with K.M. Chandy), 1988 * Distributed discrete-event simulation, 1986 * Proofs of networks of processes (with Mani Chandy), 1981 * Distributed deadlock detection (with Mani Chandy and Laura M. Haas), 1983 * The drinking philosophers problem (with Mani Chandy), 1984 * Finding repeated elements (with David Gries), 1982 * How processes learn (with Mani Chandy), 1985 * The Orc Programming Language (with D. Kitchin, A. Quark, and W. Cook), 2009 * Axioms for memory access in asynchronous hardware systems, 1986 * Powerlist: A structure for parallel recursion, 1994 * Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments Vision of a Grand Challenge Project (with

), 2008

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Misra, Jayadev Living people University of Texas at Austin faculty American computer scientists Indian computer scientists Johns Hopkins University alumni 1947 births Indian emigrants to the United States American academics of Indian descent IIT Kanpur alumni