Business and technologyאהוד שפירא

Ehud Shapiro

Ehud Shapiro is an Israeli computer scientist and biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, known for Concurrent Prolog, the Internet startup Ubique and work on molecular computers.

born 1955Inventing Concurrent PrologFounding UbiqueBiomolecular computersThe human cell lineage tree

Born: 28 February 1955, Israel
Occupation: bioinformatician, computer scientist, biochemist
Education: Yale University
Founded: Ubique (1994)

Ehud Shapiro was born in 1955 in Israel

Ehud Shapiro was born in Jerusalem in 1955 and moved to Ramat Gan as a teenager. In high school he learned about the philosophy of Karl Popper through a project supervised by Moshe Kroy.

He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and philosophy at Tel Aviv University in 1979. His PhD in computer science at Yale University, with Dana Angluin, gave an algorithmic reading of Popper's ideas and produced a method for debugging programs in Prolog. His thesis was published in 1982.

In 1982 he joined the Weizmann Institute of Science and invented Concurrent Prolog, a language for parallel and distributed computing. In 1993 he took leave to found Ubique and serve as its CEO. The company built Virtual Places, was sold to America Online in 1995 and to IBM in 1998.

After returning to Weizmann in 1998, he worked on computers made of biological molecules that could diagnose disease inside the body. He was named biotechnology person of the year for 2004. From 2005 he promoted the effort to uncover the human cell lineage tree.

In 2020 he registered the political party Democratit. He founded the Ba Rock Band, in which he sings bass baritone, and lives in Nataf.