Joe Halpern's Home Page

JOSEPH Y. HALPERN

Professor

Cornell University
Computer Science Department
4130 Upson Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
Tel: (607) 255-9562; Fax: (607) 255-4428
halpern at cs dot cornell dot edu

My research focuses on reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, and its applications to distributed computing, AI, security, and game theory, although I've also done work (and continue to be interested in) such topics as fault tolerance in distributed computing, modal logic, causality, program verification, and programming language semantics. My work lies at the boundary of a number of fields. I recently gave a talk in the economics department at Princeton where I described myself as someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics, who calls himself a computer scientist, and is giving a talk to economists about a subject mainly studied by philosophers. That's probably the best one-sentence description I can give. If you'd like more details, check my

list of publications.

It has pointers to abstracts of all my papers; in many cases, the paper itself is also available. Other details of my activities are in my

resume.

My work is supported by NSF, AFOSR, and ARO. I am also involved in a MURI project called "Science of Cyber Security".

I'm now department chair, so I will typically be teaching only one course a year. alternating between teaching

Reasoning About Knowledge (COM S 6764; formerly CS676).
Reasoning About Uncertainty (COM S 6766; formerly CS677).
Decision-Making in Complex Environments (CS 5846, crosslisted as ECON 4760 and ECON 6760; formerly CS 576 and ECON 476/676) with some subset of Professors David Easley and Larry Blume in Economics.

I will be teaching CS 6766 in Spring 2013; I taught CS 6764 in Spring 2012; and I taught CS 5846 in Fall 2010. I expect to teach CS 5846 agin in 2013-14.

When I get done with being chair, I expect to go back to teaching undergarduate course like CS2800 (formerly CS280).