Pierre Wolper - Biography#

Born in 1955, Pierre Wolper obtained an electrical engineering degree from the University of Liège in 1978. In 1982, he obtained a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University (California, USA). From 1982 to 1986, he was a member of of the technical staff of Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA). In 1986 he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Liège and promoted to full professor in 1989. He served as Chairman of the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 2001 to 2009 and was elected Vice-Rector for research of the University of Liège in 2009.

Pierre Wolper is member of the editorial board of the International Journal on Formal Methods in System Design and of the open access journal Logical Methods in Computer Science. He was chairman of the Steering Committee of the SPIN workshop series from 2004 to 2008 and has served on numerous conference program committees.

His scientific contributions include the "automata-theoretic approach" to verification problems, the concepts of data-independence and of network invariant as used in verification, partial-order methods for the verification of concurrent software, and results on the verification of infinite-state systems. Though often initially theoretical, Pierre Wolper's work has been exploited in implemented verification tools, most notably in the SPIN system.