In Memoriam: Remember Those We Lost in 2020
Please help us honor and remember the following individuals from our CEDA Community that we lost in 2020.
Professor Edmund M. Clarke
1945 –2020
Dear EDA community,
We sincerely hope that everyone is well and staying healthy in this unprecedented time. It is our great regret to inform that Professor Edmund M. Clarke, a professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, died of COVID-19 after a long illness in December 2020. He was 75. As you all know, Professor is best known for his work in model checking, an automated method for formally verifying computer systems and won the prestigious A.M. Turing award thanks to his seminal contributions to our fields. Here are a few paragraphs of eulogies from ones who know Prof. Clarke well.
--by Randal E. Bryant, the Founders University Professor of Computer Science Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University: Ed Clarke’s work on model checking has had a major impact on the use of formal verification in EDA. Model checking enables users to describe desired properties of a finite-state system (e.g., a sequential circuit) and then automatically determine whether or not a system satisfies that property. Ed (along with his PhD student Allen Emerson) formulated model checking in the early 1980s, but it could only handle very small systems. It first became viable for real-life systems with the advent of BDD-based symbolic model checking in the mid-1990s, initially through the efforts of Ed’s PhD student Ken McMillan. Then in the late 1990s, Ed, along with a group of PhD students and post-docs, formulated bounded model checking. This can only prove that desired properties would hold up to some fixed number of cycles, but it leverages Boolean satisfiability (SAT) technology to scale to much larger systems. Over the past four decades, these ideas have been revised and refined by Ed, his students and post-docs, as well as researchers around the world to make model checking one of the cornerstones of formal verification. Ed was a rare example of someone who could build on his theoretical background in formal logic, while also having a practical mind and an appreciation for addressing the needs of real-life system designers. He was especially gifted at mentoring his PhD students and his post-docs, many of whom have pursued successful careers in EDA, both in academia and in industry.
--by Ken McMillan, a former graduate student: Ed was a founder and visionary leader in the field of Computer-Aided Verification. His early work on Temporal Logic Model Checking with Alan Emerson in the 1980’s set the paradigm for a field that continues to be vibrant and active. Over a period of decades, he and his research group were deeply involved in nearly all of the major research advances that led to the practical use of model checking in industry, including the applications of Decision Diagrams and Boolean Satisfiability, and the development of automated abstraction. He was also a friend, a mentor and an inspiration to many in the field, including myself. As his graduate student in the late 1980’s, I experienced the exciting atmosphere of possibility in the new research area that Ed was instrumental in creating. His style of advising students was subtle, and yet surprisingly effective. He would observe his student’s work, make unexpected connections from his broad knowledge, and suggest readings from the many alphabetized stacks of papers he kept in his office, always somehow pushing the student in the right direction. I think this light touch contributed to the remarkable impact of his research group over the years. Ed’s ideas, his enthusiasm and his generosity of spirit have touched the lives of generations of researchers and provided a foundation for many successful careers. His vision will continue to inspire generations to come.
–by Dr. Andreas Kuehlmann, the CEO of Tortuga Logic, Inc.: Professor Ed Clarke’s impact on us cannot be overstated. His foundational contributions to formal verification changed the way we think about systems and how to ensure their correctness. It led to many theoretical and practical results with broad influence on industry’s best practices and triggered much subsequent research. Ed inspired all of us to tackle problems with a combination of rigorous thinking and seeking solutions that are practical. He mentored many graduate students who themselves became leaders in their respective fields and will continue to carry his vision forward. I was very fortunate to work with Ed and many of his students over the years. I am sure I speak for many in saying that he will be missed.
We lost a giant in our EDA field, but his works and contributions will be remembered for a long time.
Sincerely,
Yao-Wen Chang,
The President of IEEE CEDA
Wolfgang Rosenstiel
1954 –2020
Sometime during 1980, I met Wolfgang Rosenstiel. He was a student of Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe (KIT). During the next 40 years, we worked together at times, we met at numerous conferences and workshops, we visited each other regularly, and above all, we became good friends. He was a person with an extraordinary capacity for work with a contagiously positive and optimistic outlook, an excellent researcher and teacher, involved in many aspects of our profession.
During the 80's, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) established itself as a growing business, and as transistor counts for chips surpassed one million, logic synthesis became the way to design digital circuits. Research on and infrastructure to design chips were frantically being developed, also in Europe. Wolfgang was in the middle of it all. His Ph.D. was on the synthesis of data-flow circuits, part of high-level synthesis, then considered the next wave after logic synthesis.
At the FZI, a computer science research organization in Karlsruhe, he participated in the German project aimed at establishing an infrastructure to design chips in academia (EIS, "Entwurf Integrierter Schaltungen") and in the "Eurochip" project with similar goals on a European scale. Wolfgang was also a driving force behind CADDY (Carlsruhe Digital Design sYstem) and DSL (Digital Specification Language), both products of the early research on high-level synthesis in Karlsruhe. Later, he advocated for the establishment of SystemC as a system-level language for virtual prototyping. As Wolfgang broadened his interests, he proposed a highly reliable coarse-grained reconfigurable computer architecture. He also proposed a system-on-chip platform that can autonomously adapt to changing operating conditions.
Wolfgang went on to become one of the most prominent researchers in electronic design automation in Europe. He published extensively and had a brilliant academic career. He became a full professor at the department of computer engineering of the University of Tübingen in 1990. He stayed as a director of the FZI, having to commute occasionally between Tübingen and Karlsruhe. He was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Science in 2010. His research interests naturally broadened, including computer architecture, embedded systems, parallel systems, multimedia, and neural nets.
Since the early 1990s, Wolfgang did very forward-looking research on optimized machine learning techniques in various technical and medical applications, such as intelligent prosthesis control and brain-computer interfaces. Wolfgang caused international attention with his interdisciplinary research on invasive and non-invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI), obtaining the highly renowned ERC Advanced Grant in 2009. Recently he had been researching the optimization of human-machine interaction, paving the way for today's fastest BCI and opening up application fields such as the rehabilitation of stroke patients and the mental workload recognition.
He served the profession assiduously; examples include the general chair of EuroDAC and DATE (Design and Test in Europe), editor in chief of the Springer Journal "Design Automation for Embedded Systems" and chairman of the German Edacentrum.
I continued seeing Wolfgang regularly during the 90s and 00s. He would attend the Design Automation Conference (DAC) every year and spend several weeks at the University of California, Irvine. I think he toyed with the idea of moving to California, but his German roots and his extensive professional activities in Europe ultimately prevented that. As the Dean of the faculty of science, his professional commitments made traveling more difficult. I saw him the last time in October 2018 in Germany; he was as busy as ever.
May he rest in peace. We will miss him.
Raúl Camposano and Oliver Bringmann
Chung Laung (David) Liu
1934 –2020
Chung Laung (David) Liu, former president of National Tsing-Hua University (NTHU), passed away on November 7, 2020 in Taipei, Taiwan, at age 86.
Liu was born in Guagnzhou, China in 1934 and then moved to Macau with his mother and brothers to seek refuge from the Sino-Japanese War. In 1952, Liu came to Taiwan to pursue his university education at Tainan College of Engineering (the forerunner of National Cheng Kung University, NCKU). He received his B.S. degree in 1956 and then served as a 2nd lieutenant in the army for two years.
Liu started his graduate study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1958 and received his M.S. and Sc.D. in computer science both in 1960. During 1960-1972, Liu was on the MIT faculty, first as an assistant professor and later as an associate professor. In 1972, Liu joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as a professor, where he was Associate Provost of UIUC 1995-1998.
Liu returned to Taiwan and became President of National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) 1998-2002. During his tenure, Liu significantly improved and expanded the campus, and raised the academic standing of the university. Liu’s leadership was widely recognized by the academia and the whole society at large, and he was held in high esteem and loved by students, staff, and faculty members.
In 2000, Liu was elected as a member of Academia Sinica, the highest honor of Taiwan’s academic society. He was also a fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.
In his 50-year academic career, Liu made many pioneering and milestone contributions to modern computer science and engineering in real-time systems, electronic design automation, combinatorial optimization, discrete mathematics, etc. His textbook books entitled Elements of Discrete Mathematics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985) and Introduction to Combinatorial Mathematics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968) are widely used by numerous universities globally. His paper entitled “Scheduling algorithms for multiprogramming in a hard-real-time environment”, published in JACM in 1973, has been cited more than 12000 times. Liu received numerous prestigious awards, including the Phil Kaufman Award (a.k.a. the Nobel Prize in EDA), the IEEE Millennium Medal, the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Golden Jubilee Medal, the ACM SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award, the EDAA Achievement Award, the ACM ISPD Life-time Achievement Award, etc.
Liu was also an exceptional educator and the Ph.D. advisor of many renowned scholars, including Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (Turing Award Winner), Martin Wong (Dean of the College of Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong), and Jingsheng Jason Cong (Member of U.S. National Academy of Engineering). He received the IEEE Education Medal, the Taylor L. Booth Education Award from the IEEE Computer Society, and the Karl V. Karlstrom Education Award from the ACM.
Besides research and education, Liu also greatly influenced the development of the microelectronic industry in Taiwan. He became the Chairman of TrendFoce Corp in 2000 and served on the boards of many major Taiwan-based technology companies, such as Accton, Geothings, Faraday, FET, Macronix, MediaTek, MTI, Powerchip, UBI Pharma, and UMC.
In 2005, Liu started hosting “I Love to Talk and You Love to Laugh,” a weekly radio show produced by IC Broadcasting based in Hsinchu, Taiwan. In the past decade, Liu authored 17 books in Chinese on various subjects, including life coaching, popular sciences, etc. His humor, wisdom, and optimistic spirit inspired several generations of young scholars and students.
Liu is survived by his wife Jane W.-S. Liu, and his daughter Kathleen Liu.
An online memorial website is open at https://clliu19341025.wpcomstaging.com/. Friends are welcome to express their condolences and tributes by sharing their heartfelt thoughts on the website. Donations can be made in memory of Liu to UIUC, NTHU, and NCKU.