| Radhia Cousot | |
| Birth Date: | 6 August 1947 |
| Birth Place: | Sakiet Sidi Youssef, Tunisia |
| Death Place: | New York City |
| Citizenship: | French |
| Spouse: | Patrick Cousot |
| Field: | Computer science |
| Alma Mater: | Institut National Polytechnique de Lorraine |
| Thesis Title: | Fondements des méthodes de preuve d'invariance et de fatalité de programmes parallèles |
| Thesis Year: | 1985 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Claude Pair |
| Known For: | Abstract interpretation |
| Prizes: | ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills Award |
Radhia Cousot (6 August 1947 – 1 May 2014)[1] was a French computer scientist known for inventing abstract interpretation.
Radhia Cousot was born on 6 August 1947, in Sakiet Sidi Youssef in Tunisia, where she survived the massacre of the children in her school on February 8, 1958. She then went to the Lycée de jeunes filles at Sousse, the Lycée français at Algiers and then the Polytechnic School of Algiers (where she was ranked 1st and the only woman). She specialized in mathematical optimization and integer linear programming. Supported by a UNESCO fellowship (1972–1975), she obtained a master's degree in Computer Science (Diplôme d'études approfondies (DEA)) at the Joseph Fourier University of Grenoble in 1972. She obtained her Doctorate ès Sciences/State Doctorate in Mathematics in Nancy in 1985 under the supervision of .[2]
Radhia Cousot was appointed Associate research scientist at the IMAG laboratory of the Joseph Fourier University of Grenoble (1975–1979) and, from 1980 on, at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, as junior research scientist, research scientist, senior research scientist, and senior research scientist emerita at the Computer Science laboratories of the Henri Poincaré University of Nancy (1980–1983), the University of Paris-Sud at Orsay (1984–1988), the École Polytechnique (1989–2008) where from 1991 she headed the research team “Semantics, Proof and Abstract interpretation”, and the École Normale Supérieure (2006–2014).
Together with her husband Patrick, Radhia Cousot is the originator of abstract interpretation,[3] [4] an influential technique in formal methods. Abstract interpretation is based on three main ideas.
In her thesis, Radhia Cousot advanced the semantics, proof, and static analysis methods for concurrent and parallel programs.[5]
Radhia Cousot is at the origin of the contacts with Airbus in January 1999 that led to the development of Astrée run-time error analyzer from 2001 onwards, a tool for sound static program analysis of embeddedcontrol/command software developed at the École Normale Supérieure[6] and now distributed by AbsInt GmbH,[7] a German software company specialized on static analysis. Astrée is used in the transportation, space, and medical software industries.
With Patrick Cousot, she received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award [8] in 2013 and the IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills award [9] in 2014 for “the invention of ‘abstract interpretation’, development of tool support, and its practical application”.
Since September 2014, the Radhia Cousot best young researcher paper award[10] is attributed annually by the program chair on behalf of the program committee of the Static Analysis Symposia (SAS).[11]