- About
- Message from the Chair
- History
- Facilities
- News
- Events
- Info Sci Colloquium
- Advancing Responsible AI with Human-Centered Evaluation
- Bowers Distinguished Speaker Series - Julie E. Cohen, Georgetown University Law Center
- From Agents to Optimization: User Interface Understanding and Generation
- The Language of Creation: How Generative AI Challenges Intuitions—and Offers New Possibilities
- IS Engaged
- Graduation Info
- Info Sci Colloquium
- Contact Us
- Courses
- Research
- Computational Social Science
- Critical Data Studies
- Data Science
- Economics and Information
- Education Technology
- Ethics, Law and Policy
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Human-Robot Interaction
- Incentives and Computation
- Infrastructure Studies
- Interface Design and Ubiquitous Computing
- Natural Language Processing
- Network Science
- Social Computing and Computer-supported Cooperative Work
- Technology and Equity
- People
- Career
- Undergraduate
- Info Sci Majors
- BA - Information Science (College of Arts & Sciences)
- BS - Information Science (CALS)
- BS - Information Science, Systems, and Technology
- Studying Abroad
- MPS Early Credit Option
- Independent Research
- CPT Procedures
- Student Associations
- Undergraduate Minor in Info Sci
- Our Students and Alumni
- Graduation Info
- Contact Us
- Info Sci Majors
- Masters
- PHD
- Prospective PhD Students
- Admissions
- Degree Requirements and Curriculum
- Grad Student Orgs
- For Current PhDs
- Diversity and Inclusion
- Our Students and Alumni
- Graduation Info
- Program Contacts and Student Advising
Joe Halpern received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1975 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard in 1981. In between, he spent two years as the head of the Mathematics Department at Bawku Secondary School, in Ghana. After a year as a visiting scientist at MIT, he joined the IBM Almaden Research Center in 1982, where he remained until 1996, also serving as a consulting professor at Stanford. In 1996, he joined the CS Department at Cornell, where he was department chair 2010-14 and is currently the Joseph C. Ford Professor.
Halpern's major research interests are in reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, causality, security, distributed computation, decision theory, and game theory. Together with his former student, Yoram Moses, he pioneered the approach of applying reasoning about knowledge to analyzing distributed protocols and multi-agent systems. He has coauthored 6 patents, three books ("Reasoning About Knowledge", "Reasoning about Uncertainty", and "Actual Causality"), and over 400 technical publications.
Halpern is a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Game Theory Society, the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, AAAI, ACM, IEEE, and the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association. Among other awards, he received the the Kamp\'{e} de Feriet Award in 2016, the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2011, the Dijkstra Prize in 2009, the ACM/AAAI Newell Award in 2008, the Godel Prize in 1997, was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001-02, and a Fulbright Fellow in 2001-02 and 2009-10. Two of his papers have won best-paper prizes at IJCAI (1985 and 1991), and another two received best-paper awards at the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Conference (2006 and 2012). He was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM (1997-2003) and has been program chair of a number of conferences, including the Symposium on Theory in Computing (STOC), Logic in Computer Science (LICS), Uncertainty in AI (UAI), Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), and Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK). He started the computer science section of arxiv.org, and serves on its advisory board.