Devnology podcast 039 - David Harel

Devnology Podcast

In this episode we speak with David Harel, who is professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Born in London, England, he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the institute for seven years. Harel is best known for his work on dynamic logic, computability and software engineering. In the 1980s he invented the graphical language of Statecharts, which has been adopted as part of the UML standard. He has also published expository accounts of computer science, such as his award winning 1987 book "Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing". He currently works on many diverse topics, including visual languages, graph layout, systems biology and the communication of odours. In this interview we touch upon different topics from David's diverse fields of study. Among other things we talk about his earlier work on statecharts, about some of the content of his books on algorithmics and his current research on modeling biological systems.

This interview was recorded on the 25th of April 2013 at the Eindhoven University of Technology

Interview by @freekl and @Mmz_Audio post-production by @mendelt

Links for this podcast:

• David Harel's homepage from the Weizman Institute of Science is on http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~harel/.
• Book: D. Harel, Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing, Addison-Wesley, 3rd edition (with Y. Feldman), 2004.
• Book: D. Harel, Computers Ltd.: What They Really Can't Do, Oxford University Press, September 2000.
• Article: D. Harel, "Biting the Silver Bullet: Toward a Brighter Future for System Development", Computer 25:1 (1992), IEEE Press, 8-20 (pdf).
• Article: D. Harel, S. Maoz, S. Szekely and D. Barkan, "PlayGo: Towards a Comprehensive Tool for Scenario Based Programming", in Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 25th Int. Conf. on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2010), Antwerp, Belgium, pp. 359-360. (pdf).
• A full list of publications by David Harel on his website.
• On April 27th 2012 David Harel received an honorary doctorate from Eindhoven University of Technology