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Prof. Ralph-Johan Back, short biography

Ralph-Johan Back is Professor of Computer Science at Abo Akademi University, Turku, Finland. He recieved his Ph.D. from University of Helsinki in 1978. He has spent a post doctoral year at the Mathematical Center (now CWI) in Amsterdam (1979-80),  held a professors position at the University of Tampere (1982-83), and been a visiting professor at Caltech (1991-92) and Universty of Utrecht (1994). He  held  an Academy professor position at the Academy of Finland 2002 - 2007. He is the founder of TUCS (Turku Centre for Computer Science) and its first director, 1993 -2000. He has been  the director of two Academy of Finland  Centers of Excellence in Research (Turku Centre for Computer Science 1995 - 1999, Center for Formal Methods in Programming 2002 - 2007).  He is the inventor of the Refinement Calculus (1978) and the co-inventor of the Action system formalism (1982, together with Reino Kurki-Suonio). He has written two books on the Refinement Calculus, one published in 1980 and the second (jointly with Joakim von Wright) in 1998. His main interests are formal methods (in particular programming logics, programing methods, semantics and mechanized reasoning), distributed and parallel systems, multiprocessor technology, software engineering and teaching of mathematics. He is a member of  IFIP WG 2.3 and Academia Europea.