Ehud Shapiro (; born 1955) is an Israeli scientist, entrepreneur, artist, and political activist who is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Sciencehttp://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~udi/ Ehud Shapiro at the Weizmann Institute and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. With international reputation, he made contributions to many scientific disciplines,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgS9myPsGUw From biomolecular computing to internet democracy | Ehud Shapiro at Davos World Economic Forum, establishing a long-term research agenda for each by asking basic questions and offering a first step towards answering them, including how to computerize the process of scientific discovery, by providing an algorithmic interpretation to Karl Popper's methodology of conjectures and refutations;Popper, Karl R. (Karl Raimund), 1902-1994. Conjectures and Refutations : the Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York :Harper & Row, 19681965.Muggleton, Stephen and De Raedt, Luc, Inductive logic programming: Theory and methods.The Journal of Logic Programming, 19, 629-679. Elsevier, 1994. how to automate program debugging, by algorithms for fault localization;Caballero, Rafael and Riesco, Adrian and Silva, Josep, A survey of algorithmic debugging. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 50, 4, 1-35. ACM New York, NY, USA, 2017. how to unify parallel, distributed, and systems programming with a high-level logic-based programming language;Shapiro, Ehud, The family of concurrent logic programming languages. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 21, 3, 413-510. ACM New York, NY, USA, 1989. how to use the metaverse as a foundation for social networking; how to devise molecular computers that can function as smart programmable drugs; Condon, Anne, Automata make antisense. Nature, 429, 6990, 351-352. Nature Publishing Group UK London, 2004. how to uncover the human cell lineage tree, via single-cell genomics; A 4D Human Atlas: Charting Human Development and Ageing in Health and in DiseaseCallaway, Ewen and others, The trickiest family tree in biology. Nature, 547, 7661, 20-2022. Nature, 2017. how to support digital democracy, by devising an alternative architecture to the digital realm termed Grassroots.Ehud Shapiro, Nimrod Talmon, Foundations for Grassroots Democratic Metaverse. arXiv:2203.04090Schuler, Douglas, Counterpoint: e-democracy won't save democracy. democracy will save democracy. Communications of the ACM, 61, 8, 34-36. ACM New York, NY, USA, 2018.Ehud Shapiro, A Grassroots Architecture to Supplant Global Digital Platforms by a Global Digital Democracy. arXiv:2404.13468
Shapiro was also an early internet entrepreneur,A Real Success Out of Virtual Places, WIS Wonder Wander, October 1, 1996 and a proponent of global digital democracy.
Shapiro is the founder of the Ba Rock Bandhttp://www.ba-rock.co.il/ The official website of Ba Rock and a founder of the Israeli political party "Democratit". He is a winner of two ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grants.Doctor in a cell | ERC
Early life and education Born in Jerusalem in 1955, Shapiro became acquainted with the philosophy of science of Karl Popper through a high-school project supervised by Moshe Kroy from the Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University. In 1979, Shapiro completed his undergraduate studies in Tel Aviv University in mathematics and philosophy. Shapiro's PhD work with Dana Angluin in computer science at Yale university attempted to provide an algorithmic interpretation to Popper's philosophical approach to scientific discovery, resulting in both a computer system for the inference of logical theories from facts; and a methodology for program debugging, developed using the programming language Prolog. His thesis, "Algorithmic Program Debugging", was published by MIT Press as a 1982 ACM Distinguished Dissertation, followed in 1986 by "The Art of Prolog", a textbook co-authored with Leon Sterling.
Career Moving to the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1982 as a post-doctoral fellow, Shapiro was inspired by the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems project to invent a high-level programming language for parallel and distributed computer systems, named Concurrent Prolog. A two-volume book on Concurrent Prolog and related work was published by MIT Press in 1987.
In 1993, Shapiro took leave of absence from his tenured position at Weizmann to found Ubique Ltd. (and serve as its CEO), an early Israeli Internet software startup. Building on Concurrent Prolog, Ubique developed "Virtual Places", a 2D metaverse and social networking software that included instant messaging, chat rooms, collaborative browsing, online events and games, and voice-over-IP. Ubique was sold to America Online in 1995, and following a management buy out in 1997 was sold again to IBM in 1998.COMPANY NEWS; I.B.M. TO BUY 2 COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE COMPANIES
Shapiro attempted to build a computer from biological molecules, guided by a vision of "A Doctor in a Cell": A biomolecular computer that operates inside the living body, programmed with medical knowledge to diagnose diseases and produce the requisite drugs. Being a novice to biology, Shapiro realized his first design for a molecular computer as a LEGO-like mechanical device built using 3D stereolithography, which was patented upon his return to Weizmann in 1998. During 1999–2016, Shapiro's lab was designing and implementing various molecular computing devices.Ehud Shapiro. A mechanical turing machine: blueprint for a biomolecular computer.Interface focus, 2(4):497–503,2012.Binyamin Gil, Maya Kahan-Hanum, Natalia Skirtenko, Rivka Adar, and Ehud Shapiro. Detection of multiple disease indicators by an autonomous biomolecular computer.Nano letters, 11(7):2989–2996, 2011.Rivka Adar, Yaakov Benenson, Gregory Linshiz, Amit Rosner, Naftali Tishby, and Ehud Shapiro. Stochastic com-puting with biomolecular automata.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(27):9960–9965, 2004.Benny Gil, Maya Kahan-Hanum, Natalia Skirtenko, Rivka Adar, and Ehud Shapiro. 'doctor in a cell'-vision andaccomplishments. InALIFE, page 165, 2010.Yaakov Benenson, Tamar Paz-Elizur, Rivka Adar, Ehud Keinan, Zvi Livneh, and Ehud Shapiro. Programmable andautonomous computing machine made of biomolecules.Nature, 414(6862):430–434, 2001.Yaakov Benenson, Binyamin Gil, Uri Ben-Dor, Rivka Adar, and Ehud Shapiro. An autonomous molecular computer for logical control of gene expression.Nature, 429(6990):423–429, 2004.Tom Ran, Shai Kaplan, and Ehud Shapiro. Molecular implementation of simple logic programs. Nature Nanotechnology, 4(10):642, 2009.
In 2011, Shapiro designed an effective method of synthesizing error-free DNA molecules from error-prone building blocks, and founded the CADMAD consortium (Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing of DNA libraries):
In 2005, Shapiro presented a vision of the next grand challenge in human biology: To uncover the Human cell lineage tree.Frumkin, D., Wasserstrom, A., Kaplan, S., Feige, U., & Shapiro, E. (2005). Genomic variability within an organism exposes its cell lineage tree. PLoS computational biology, 1(5), e50. The history of how the human body grows from a single cell (the fertilized egg) to 100 trillion cells is captured by the cell lineage tree. In his TEDxTel-Aviv talk "Uncovering The Human Cell Lineage Tree The next grand scientific challenge" Shapiro described the system and results obtained with it so far, and a proposal for a FET Flagship project "Human Cell Lineage Flagship initiative" for uncovering the Human cell lineage tree in health and disease. The international Human Cell Atlas project, initiated by Shapiro's former Ph.D. student Aviv Regev, aims to address the precursor question of describing all cell types in the human body.
Research Popper suggested that all scientific theories are by nature conjectures and inherently fallible, and that refutation to old theory is the paramount process of scientific discovery. Shapiro's doctoral studies with Angluin attempted to provide an algorithmic interpretation to Popper's approach to scientific discovery in particular for automating the "Conjectures and Refutations" method making bold conjectures and then performing experiments that seek to refute them. Shapiro generalized this into the "Contradiction Backtracing Algorithm" an algorithm for backtracking contradictions.Shapiro, Ehud Y. Inductive inference of theories from facts. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University, Department of Computer Science, 1981. This algorithm is applicable whenever a contradiction occurs between some conjectured theory and the facts. By testing a finite number of ground atoms for their truth in the model the algorithm can trace back a source for this contradiction, namely a false hypothesis, and can demonstrate its falsity by providing a counterexample to it.
Shapiro laid the theoretical foundation for inductive logic programming and built its first implementation (Model Inference System): a Prolog program that inductively inferred logic programs from positive and negative examples. Inductive logic programming has nowadays bloomed as a subfield of artificial intelligence and machine learning which uses logic programming as a uniform representation for examples, background knowledge and hypotheses. Recent work in this area, combining logic programming, learning and probability, has given rise to the new field of statistical relational learning.
Algorithmic program debugging
Algorithmic debugging was first developed by Shapiro during his PhD research at Yale University, as introduced in his PhD thesis,Shapiro, Ehud Y. (1983). Algorithmic program debugging. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. selected as a 1982 ACM Distinguished Dissertation. Shapiro implemented the method of algorithmic debugging in PrologClocksin, William F., Christopher S. Mellish, and W. F. Clocksin. Programming in PROLOG. Vol. 4. Berlin etc.: Springer, 1987. (a general purpose logic programming language) for the debugging of logic programs.
In case of logic programs, the intended behavior of the program is a model (a set of simple true statements) and bugs are manifested as program incompleteness (inability to prove a true statement) or incorrectness (ability to prove a false statement). The algorithm would identify a false statement in the program and provide a counter-example to it or a missing true statement that it or its generalization should be added to the program. A method to handle non-termination was also developed. Since then, the approach of algorithmic debugging has been expanded and applied to many programming languages.https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Handbook+of+Software+Fault+Localization%3A+Foundations+and+Advances-p-978111929180 Handbook of Software Fault Localization: Foundations and Advances. W. Eric Wong (Editor), T.H. Tse (Editor), May 2023.
The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project
The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project (FGCS) was an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, begun in 1982, to create a computer using massively parallel computing/processing. It was to be the result of a massive government/industry research project in Japan during the 1980s. It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with-supercomputer-like performance and to provide a platform for future developments in artificial intelligence.
In 1982, during a visit to the ICOT, Shapiro invented Concurrent Prolog, a novel concurrent programming language that integrated logic programming and concurrent programming. Concurrent Prolog is a logic programming language designed for concurrent programming and parallel execution. It is a process oriented language, which embodies dataflow synchronization and guarded-command indeterminacy as its basic control mechanisms.