Patrick Cousot

Who is Patrick Cousot?

Patrick Cousot is a French computer scientist.

Together with his wife Radhia, Cousot is the originator of abstract interpretation, an influential technique in formal methods. In the 2000s, he has worked on practical methods of static analysis for critical embedded software, such as found in avionics. He has been Professor of Computer Science at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris since 1991. As of March 2008, Cousot is a Professor of Computer Science at New York University.

He is a knight in the Ordre National du Mérite and the Ordre des Palmes académiques. In 1999 he received the silver medal of CNRS and in 2006 the great prize of the EADS Foundation. In 2001, he was bestowed an honorary doctorate by Saarland University, Germany. With Radhia Cousot, he received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award in 2013 and the IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills award in 2014 for “ For the invention of ‘abstract interpretation’, development of tool support, and its practical application ”. Dr. Cousot is a member of the Board of Trustees at the IMDEA Software Institute.