Mehdi Harandi

2013 Distinguished Alumni Service Award

Mehdi T. Harandi obtained his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Manchester, England, in 1976 and 1979, respectively. In 1979 he joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois. He retired from the department in fall 2011.

At Illinois, Harandi established and directed the Knowledge-Based Programming Assistant project, a large-scale research project for studying and developing knowledge-based software development tools. He also co-directed the Advanced Collaborative Systems Laboratory for research and development of collaborative, intelligent systems. He was the co-principal investigator of the Illinois Software Engineering Program (ISEP). He has done extensive research in distributed information systems, expert systems, knowledge representation and acquisition, software reuse, specification and design, reverse engineering, and intelligent programming tools. His research has resulted in three best paper awards.

He is the designer of GPSI, a domain-independent expert system environment that was used for many years in a number of different domains in industry and academia. His research also led to the design and development of several intelligent tools for software development, including IDeA (design), SPECIFIER (specification), PAT (program understanding), and APU (program synthesis).

Harandi served as the director of the graduate program from 1999 to 2005. He then became an associate head of the department, a position he held until his retirement.

Harandi served as the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Expert Systems from 1986 to 1998. He was a founding editor of the Journal of Automated Software Engineering and served on its editorial board from 1994 to 2010. In 1997 he was awarded the ACM’s Recognition of Service Award. He is a senior member of ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.