Ehud Shapiro

Ehud Shapiro (אהוד שפירא; born 1955) is an Israeli scientist, entrepreneur, artist, and political activist who is Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

With international reputation, he made fundamental contributions to many scientific disciplines, laying in each a long-term research agenda by asking a novel basic question and offering a first step towards answering it, including how to computerize the process of scientific discovery, by providing an algorithmic interpretation to Karl Popper's methodology of conjectures and refutations; how to automate program debugging, by algorithms for fault localization; how to unify parallel, distributed, and systems programming with a high-level logic-based programming language; how to use the metaverse as a foundation for social networking; how to devise molecular computers that can function as smart programmable drugs; how to uncover the human cell lineage tree, via single-cell genomics; how to support digital democracy, by devising an alternative architecture to the digital realm.

Shapiro was also an internet pioneer, entrepreneur, and a pioneer and proponent of digital democracy.

Shapiro is the founder of the Ba Rock Band and a founder of the Israeli political party "Democratit".

He is a winner of two ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grants.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Algorithmic debugging was first developed by Shapiro during his PhD research at Yale University, as introduced in his PhD thesis, selected as a 1982 ACM Distinguished Dissertation.

Shapiro implemented the method of algorithmic debugging in Prolog (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.

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.

In 1982, during a visit to the ICOT, Shapiro invented Concurrent Prolog, a novel concurrent programming language that integrated logic programming and concurrent programming.

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 Israeli Internet software pioneer.

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.

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.

In 2005, Shapiro presented a vision of the next grand challenge in human biology: To uncover the Human cell lineage tree.

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.

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.

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.

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):