Tal Lev-Ami is a computer scientist, co-founder and CTO of Cloudinary, a cloud-based image management system.

Tal received his PhD from Tel-Aviv University in 2009, under the supervision of Prof. Shmuel Sagiv. His PhD research, “Efficient Transformers for the Verification of Heap Manipulating Programs”, explored the problem of automatically verifying computer programs operating on the heap—the dynamically-allocated memory used by programs to store information. He used the theory of “abstract interpretation” to conservatively approximate the runtime behavior of a program. One of the major challenges in this framework is the development of efficient and precise “abstract transformers” to capture the effect of each program statement. The provision of such transformers enables the verification of larger programs too complex for previous systems.

Tal’s MSc work was equally revolutionary. In his thesis, “TVLA: A Framework for Kleene Based Static Analysis”, Tal developed the Three-Valued-Logic Analyzer (TVLA), a tool for generating software verification algorithms, which has been used subsequently by researchers in leading universities worldwide. His thesis tackled theoretically difficult problems and came up with ingenious solutions and parts of it were published in top-rated conference proceedings.

This outstanding work was recognized by Tel-Aviv University, which awarded Tal the Celia and Marcos Maus Annual Prize in Computer Science.