Dr. Gerard Holzmann, who recently joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has won a Thomas Alva Edison patent award in the information technology category.
The award, given by the Research and Development Council of New Jersey, will be presented Nov. 6 at the council's annual awards dinner in Jersey City, N.J. Holzmann shares the award, which was for work performed when he was with Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in New Jersey, with two co-inventors.
Holzmann's invention, called "Method and Apparatus for Testing Event Driven Software," has been used to test the flight software for NASA's Mars Pathfinder and Deep Space 1 missions and will be used on Deep Impact, a spacecraft planned for launch in 2004 that will visit comet Tempel 1 in an effort to understand what is inside a comet.
"It's a wonderful honor to receive this award, and a true privilege to be able to apply these techniques in JPL missions," said Holzmann, principal computer scientist in JPL's new Laboratory for Reliable Software.
Software assurance is of primary importance in a world increasingly guided by computers that control applications as varied as interplanetary space missions and earthly telephone switches. Holzmann's invention addresses this challenge and introduces new software verification techniques.
JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
For more information on the Research and Development Council of New Jersey, please see http://www.rdnj.org. More information on JPL is available at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov.
The award, given by the Research and Development Council of New Jersey, will be presented Nov. 6 at the council's annual awards dinner in Jersey City, N.J. Holzmann shares the award, which was for work performed when he was with Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in New Jersey, with two co-inventors.
Holzmann's invention, called "Method and Apparatus for Testing Event Driven Software," has been used to test the flight software for NASA's Mars Pathfinder and Deep Space 1 missions and will be used on Deep Impact, a spacecraft planned for launch in 2004 that will visit comet Tempel 1 in an effort to understand what is inside a comet.
"It's a wonderful honor to receive this award, and a true privilege to be able to apply these techniques in JPL missions," said Holzmann, principal computer scientist in JPL's new Laboratory for Reliable Software.
Software assurance is of primary importance in a world increasingly guided by computers that control applications as varied as interplanetary space missions and earthly telephone switches. Holzmann's invention addresses this challenge and introduces new software verification techniques.
JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
For more information on the Research and Development Council of New Jersey, please see http://www.rdnj.org. More information on JPL is available at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov.