UTCS Professor Jay Misra has been awarded the 2014 IIT Kanpur Distinguished Alumnus Award. Misra currently teaches Analysis of Algorithms, Theory in Programming Practice, and Distributed Computing. In addition, his current research focuses on the design of a concurrent programming language, Orc. 

The Distinguished Alumnus Award (DAA) is the highest award given by IIT Kanpur to its alumni in recognition of their outstanding achievements. Every year the Institute works with its alumni to honour individuals who have made a mark in their respective fields of expertise. Nominations can be made for achievements and pursuits in: academic excellence, professional excellence, entrepreneurship and management, and any service of humanity at large.  Previous Computer Science winners include NRN Murthy (CEO, Infosys), Arvind (MIT), Ashok Chandra (IBM), and Ravi Sethi (Avaya).

In support of Misra's nomination, Tony Hoare, who won the Turing award for his contributions in this area, wrote the following statement: "I am delighted to give my strongest support for the nomination of Jay Misra for the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT, Kanpur. He has made outstanding contributions to the science of computer programming. His truly original achievements in the area of Concurrent Programs, Distributed Systems, and Transactions are outstanding. Their significance is becoming ever more apparent. He has been an excellent colleague and friend to me and it has been a real privilege to work with him in the areas of strong overlap between our interests."

Leslie Lamport, the 2014 Turing Award winner, describes Jay's work: "The first major step in getting beyond traditional 
programming languages to describe concurrent algorithms was Misra and Chandy's Unity … Misra and Chandy developed proof rules to formalize the style of reasoning that had been developed for proving invariance and leads-to properties. Unity provided the most elegant formulation yet for these proofs."

Congratulations to our professor and Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Science, Jay Misra, for this well-deserved award!