David Harel

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David Harel (right) with Carl Hewitt at FLoC 2006

David Harel (Hebrew: דוד הראל‎; born 1950) is a 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" and has made appearances on Israeli radio and television. He currently works on many diverse topics, including visual languages, graph layout, systems biology and the communication of odours.

He is now working on a computer model of a nematode, 'Caenorhabditis elegans', which was the first multicellular organism to have its genome completely sequenced. The eventual completeness of such a model depends on his updated version of the test developed by Alan Turing to identify whether computers could reason well enough that a human communicating with them could not tell whether a human or a machine was at the other end of the communication.^[1]

He is a fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.