Radhia Cousot is an emeritus CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) senior research scientist in Computer Science, at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. She is Doctor ès Sciences in Mathematics.
Radhia Cousot was appointed from 1980 as CNRS junior research scientist, research scientist and senior research scientist at the Computer Science laboratories of the University Henri Poincaré of Nancy (1980–1983), University Paris-Sud at Orsay (1984–1988), École Polytechnique (1989–2008) where from 1991 she headed the research team “Semantics, Proof and Abstract interpretation”, and École Normale Supérieure (from 2006 to present).
Radhia Cousot was awarded the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award (2013) with Patrick Cousot.
Radhia Cousot is the inventor, with Patrick Cousot, of Abstract Interpretation, a fundamental, general, and unifying theory of sound abstraction and approximation of the mathematical structures involved in the formal semantics (describing the possible behaviors of systems), the formal specification (describing the intended behaviors of systems), the static analysis (to let a computer fully automatically infer properties of systems from their formal descriptions, as necessary for verification), the proof (to check manually or with the assistance of a theorem prover or proof assistant that systems have specified properties), and the verification (to let a computer fully automatically check that systems have specified properties) of computer (and biological) systems. Abstract Interpretation has proved to scale up to automatically verify very large systems as found in advanced real-world industrial applications in transportation, communications and medicine.
