zoom_in Click to enlarge

Edmund Clarke

▲ ▼

description Edmund Clarke Overview

Edmund Clarke was an American computer scientist and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He co-developed the concept of model checking, an automated technique for verifying hardware and software systems against formal specifications, alongside E. Allen Emerson. Clarke and his students later advanced symbolic model checking using binary decision diagrams, allowing the verification of significantly larger systems.

For these foundational contributions to formal verification, he received the ACM Turing Award in 2007.

help Edmund Clarke FAQ

What is model checking and how did Edmund Clarke pioneer it?

Model checking, developed by Clarke and his student E. Allen Emerson at Carnegie Mellon University in the early 1980s, is an automated technique that exhaustively verifies whether a finite-state system satisfies a specification expressed in temporal logic. Clarke, Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis shared the 2007 Turing Award for this work, which is now standard practice in hardware verification.

What is symbolic model checking and why was it a breakthrough?

Clarke and his students developed symbolic model checking in the early 1990s using Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) to represent state spaces compactly, allowing verification of systems with astronomically large state spaces. This breakthrough enabled industry adoption, particularly by chip manufacturers like Intel for verifying processor designs against correctness specifications.

What tools did Edmund Clarke develop for formal verification?

Clarke's group developed SMV (Symbolic Model Verifier), one of the most widely used model checking tools in academia and industry. SMV influenced NuSMV, an open-source reimplementation still maintained and used in formal verification courses, and Clarke's group also pioneered bounded model checking using SAT solvers.

What was Edmund Clarke's role at Carnegie Mellon University?

Clarke was the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University from 1982 until his death in 2020. He founded the Computer-Aided Verification group at CMU, which trained numerous PhD students who went on to lead verification research at major universities and companies.