Name:
Joe Halpern
Title:
Professor (Computer Science) and Co-Director, Cognitive Studies
Program
Company:
Cornell University
How I arrived at my present job (academic and other influences): I went to graduate school after spending two years in Africa (with the Canadian equivalent of the Peace Corps), mainly because I was good at math and didn't particularly want a real job. After that, I basically followed the path of least resistance, especially after I discovered that I was much better at research than I ever expected to be and how I enjoyed the academic lifestyle.
How I organize my day: I try to spend two weekdays working at home. That's when I get most of my technical work and reading done. I spend an average of 2+ hours each day reading and responding to email. I find it hard to avoid reading email, so when I'm at home, I work locally until 2-3 PM. When I'm at the office, most of my day is filled with teaching and meetings.
Amount of time spent working daily (at home and office): I probably average 10 hours/day on weekdays, and then typically another 5 hours over the weekend, or roughly 55 hours/week. That's not counting thinking in the shower.
What I do to get myself thinking creatively: I do a lot of thinking in the shower and riding my bike.
What I do to relieve stress: Play with my kids, read, and watch television. I used to play guitar and piano, and I keep meaning to start up again. Maybe when the kids are a little older ...
My hero, mentor, or person I most admire and why: Probably the most influential person in my research career was Albert Meyer, my advisor. He taught me that writing a paper was like telling a story; you need to focus on the story line. He also taught me the importance of trying to home in on the essential elements of a problem, in an effort to understand what is really going on.
What I do to mentor those who work for me: I try to pass along the lessons I learned from Albert.
What values are the most important to me and what I value in others: Integrity, honesty, and compassion (not necessarily in that order), and a certain enthusiasm for life.
What inspires, motivates, or gets me excited about my job on a daily basis: I've been lucky to have wonderful students and co-authors, who have made doing research a lot of fun. And then every so often, there are the special moments when I feel like I've stumbled on true understanding. It's exciting.
Biography: Here's my standard bio. It's sometimes hard for me to believe that I really did all those things ...
I received a Bs.C. in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1975 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard in 1981. In between, I spent two years as the head of the Mathematics Department at Bawku Secondary School, in Ghana. After a year as a visiting scientist at MIT, I joined the IBM Almaden Research Center in 1982, where I remained until 1996. I then moved to Cornell University, where I am a professor in Computer Science and co-director of the Cognitive Studies program. I was also a consulting professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University from 1984-1996. From 1988 to 1990, I was the manager of the Mathematics and Related Computer Science Department at IBM.
My major research interests are in reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, distributed computation, and modal logic. My former student, Yoram Moses, and I pioneered the approach of applying reasoning about knowledge to analyzing distributed protocols and multi-agent systems. I have coauthored 5 patents, a book ("Reasoning About Knowledge"), and over 100 technical publications.
I was program chairman and organizer of the first conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge, program chairman of the fifth ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, and program chairman of the 23rd ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. I received the Publishers' Prize for Best Paper at at the International Joint Conference on Artifical Intelligence in 1985 (joint with Ronald Fagin) and in 1989, the 1997 Godel Prize (joint with Yoram Moses), and two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards. I'm a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. I'm editor-in-chief of Journal of the ACM, and also serve on the editorial board of Information and Computation, Journal of Logic and Computation, Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science, and Artificial Intelligence.
Last Modified:
Location: www.acm.org/crossroads/dayinlife/bios/joe_halpern.html