Randal E. Bryant (born October 27, 1952) is an American computer scientist and academic noted for his research on formally verifying digital hardware and software. Bryant has been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University since 1984. He served as the Dean of the School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon from 2004 to 2014. Dr. Bryant retired and became a Founders University Professor Emeritus on June 30, 2020. Bryant has received many recognitions for his research on hardware and software verification as well as algorithms and computer architecture. His 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. In 2009 Bryant was awarded the Phil Kaufman Award by the EDA Consortium "for his seminal technological breakthroughs in the area of formal verification."

Early life and education

Bryant was born on October 27, 1952, and is the son of John H. Bryant and Barbara Everitt Bryant, and the grandson of William Littell Everitt, former dean of the electrical engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (1949–68). His sister is Lois Bryant, a textile artist. Bryant was raised in Birmingham, Michigan. Starting in 1970, he attended the University of Michigan, where he received his B.S. in applied mathematics in 1973. His master thesis on Simulation of Packet Communication Architecture Computer Systems, published in 1977, is known to be one of the first publications on distributed simulation. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981.

Career

Research and publications

Awards and honors