Rajeev Alur

Research

Rajeev Alur is the Zisman Family Professor in Computer and Information Science (CIS). He is also the founding director of the ASSET Center. He is known for his foundational contributions to formal methods, automata theory and programming languages. Alur’s research has had a significant impact on areas such as real-time systems, hybrid systems, and software verification. He is best known for introducing timed automata, which has become a standard model for the verification of real-time systems, and nested words, which generalizes both linear sequences and hierarchically nested structures for language processing. Alur’s work has broad applications across computer science, including cyber-physical systems, multi-agent systems and control theory.

Alur has authored over 52,000 citations and has received numerous awards, such as the inaugural Computer-Aided Verification (CAV) Award and the 2024 Knuth Prize, reflecting the influence of his research on both theory and practice. In addition to his research, Alur plays a leadership role at Penn, where he also contributes to shaping the next generation of researchers in his field.