Kanianthra Mani Chandy

Co-proposer of a new solution to the Dining Philosophers problem, Chandy is recognized for his contributions to concurrent algorithm design and distributed computing. Along with J. Misra, he proposed the solution in 1984; the Dining Philosophers problem is an example problem often used in concurrent algorithm design to illustrate synchronization issues and techniques for resolving them.

Chandy has served as the Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology, and has served as Executive Officer of the Computer Science Department twice. He joined Caltech as a professor in 1989, having earlier worked for Honeywell and IBM. From 1970 to 1989, he was in the Computer Science Department of the University of Texas at Austin, serving as chair in 1978–79 and 1983–85.

Chandy received his Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1965 and his Master's degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Electrical Engineering at the Operations Research Center in 1969 with a thesis in Operations Research.

His research focused on distributed computing, a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system is a software system in which components located on networked computers communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages. Chandy described the Snapshot algorithm together with Leslie Lamport.

He has served as a consultant to a number of companies including IBM and Bell Labs, and has been a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Chandy received the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award for Computers and Communication in 1987 and the A.A. Michelson Award from the Computer Measurement Group in 1985. He published three books and over a hundred papers on distributed computing, verification of concurrent programs, parallel programming languages, and performance models of computing and communication systems, including the eponymous BCMP networks, a class of queueing network for which a product-form equilibrium distribution exists.

Other recent publications included: (with Concetta Pilotto and Ryan McLean) "Networked Sensing Systems for People Carrying Radiation Material," Fifth Intn'l Conf. on Networked Sensing Systems, (INSS 2008), June 2008; (with Matt Wu and Annie Liu) "Virtual Environments for Developing Strategies to Interdict Terrorists Carrying Dirty Bombs," Intn'l Conf. on Inf. Syst. for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2008), May 2008; (with Sayan Mitra) "A Theory for Verifying Stability and Convergence of Automata Formalized in PVS," Theorem Proving in Higher Order Logics (TPHOLS 2008), August 2008; (with M. Charpentier, A. Capponi) "Towards a Theory of Events," Distributed Event Based Systems (DEBS 2007), June 2007; and (with M. Charpentier) "Self Similar Algorithms for Dynamic Distributed Systems," International Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems, (ICDCS 2007), June 2007.