Randal Bryant

Randal E. Bryant (born October 27, 1952) is an American computer scientist and academic noted for his research on formally verifying digital hardware, and more recently some forms of software. He is also Dean of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, where he has taught since 1984.

Bryant's 1986 paper on symbolic Boolean manipulation using Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) has the highest citation count of any publication in the Citeseer database of computer science literature. [cite web|url = http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/source.html | accessdate = 2007-03-05 | title = Most cited source documents | date = September, 2006 | work = Citeseer] In addition, he has developed several techniques to verify circuits by symbolic simulation, with levels of abstraction ranging from transistors to very high-level representations.

Bryant is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, as well as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded the 1997 ACM Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for contributing to the development of symbolic model checking, as well as the 1989 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize for the best paper appearing in any IEEE publication during the preceding year.

Early life and education

Bryant was raised in Birmingham, Michigan and is the son of John H. Bryant and Barbara E. Bryant. He received his B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1973, and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. He was on the faculty at Caltech from 1981 to 1984.

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