More than 50 friends and colleagues of Edmund M. Clarke, FORE Systems University Professor of Computer Science, will deliver technical talks Sept. 19–20 at the Clarke Symposium 2014, celebrating the work of both the Turing Award winner and the model-checking community he helped create.

In addition to technical talks on both days in the Asian Students Association conference room in the Gates and Hillman centers, the conference will include a Saturday evening banquet for Clarke’s planned retirement in 2015.

Clarke played a leading role in developing model checking, a formal method for verifying the correctness of computer hardware and software design. For that achievement, he shared the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2007 Turing Award, considered the highest honor that can be bestowed on a computer scientist, and earlier this year received the Franklin Institute’s prestigious Bower Award and Prize.

The technical talks will be from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day and are open to the public. Speakers include faculty members, former students and fellow researchers in the model-checking community. Kenneth McMillan of Microsoft Research, Somesh Jha of the University of Wisconsin, and former CMU faculty member Dawn Song, now of the University of California, Berkeley, are among the guest speakers. Andre Platzer, David Brumley and former SCS dean Randy Bryant are some of the CMU faculty members slated to speak.

Clarke directs Computational Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems, a National Science Foundation project that is extending model checking and other formal verification techniques to produce insights into a variety of complex systems, from embedded computer systems to cancer.

He has received numerous individual honors and awards from industry and academic organizations during his career. He is a fellow of the ACM and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Chinese Academy of Sciences last year named him an Einstein Professor. Clarke co-founded the International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification and is the former editor-in-chief of Formal Methods in Systems Design.