Ehud Shapiro

Prof. Ehud Shapiro (Hebrew: אהוד שפירא‎; born 1955) is an Israeli scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he is a professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, and Biological Chemistry, winner of two ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grants.

Education and Professional Background

Born in Jerusalem in 1955, the guiding light for Ehud Shapiro's scientific endeavors was the philosophy of science of Karl Popper, with which he became acquainted through a high-school project supervised by Moshe Kroy from the Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University. Shapiro served in the Israeli Defense Forces from 1973 till 1977 as a tank's crewman, commander and officer, followed by undergraduate studies in Tel Aviv University in Mathematics and Philosophy, completed with distinction in 1979. Shapiro's PhD work with Dana Angluin in Computer Science at Yale university attempted to provide an algorithmic interpretation to Popper's philosophical approach to scientific discovery, resulting in both a computer system for the inference of logical theories from facts and a methodology for program debugging, developed using the programming language Prolog. His thesis, "Algorithmic Program Debugging", was published by MIT Press as a 1982 ACM Distinguished Dissertation, followed in 1986 by "The Art of Prolog", a textbook co-authored with Leon Sterling.