Members

Moshe Y. Vardi is a University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. He is the recipient of three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Blaise Pascal Medal, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award, the Southeastern Universities Research Association's Distinguished Scientist Award, the ACM SIGLOG Church Award, the Knuth Prize, and the ACM Allen Newell Award.

He is the author and co-author of over 600 papers, as well as two books: Reasoning about Knowledge and Finite Model Theory and Its Applications. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the European Academy of Science, and Academia Europaea.

He holds seven honorary doctorates. He is currently a Senior Editor of the Communications of the ACM, after having served for a decade as Editor-in-Chief.

In this era of Complexity, Dr. Vasconcelos seeks to explore the emergent properties of complex systems and their interconnectedness. From climate change to global misinformation, our collective inability to manage these systems results in a multitude of systemic crises.

He employs a variety of mathematical and computational methods, coupled with experiments and observations, and delves into the intricacies of systems involving humans, resources, and governing institutions. His ultimate aim is to utilize this knowledge to address some of society’s most pressing problems.

He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, working at the Computational Science Lab at the Informatics Institute (IvI), collaborating with a great team locally and many great fellows around the world. He co-leads the Polder initiative at the Institute of Advanced Studies and coordinates the development of a new Master’s program in Complex Systems and Policy at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Previously, he was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, at Princeton University, where he also did two postdocs. He finished his Ph.D. in Sciences at the University of Minho, in Portugal, in 2017.

Anil Kumar S. Vullikanti is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and at the Biocomplexity Institute. Vullikanti received his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He was a post-doctoral researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics and a technical staff member at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Vullikanti's research interests are in the broad areas of approximation and randomized algorithms, dynamical systems, wireless networks, social networks, computation epidemiology, and the modeling, simulation, and analysis of socio-technical systems. His work has been published in journals and conferences in different areas, such as Nature, Journal of the ACM, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and the SIAM Journal on Computing and Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Computing. Vullikanti’s name appears as V.S. Anil Kumar in most publications. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the DOE Early Career award.