Ehud Shapiro

Born in Jerusalem in 1955, Shapiro became acquainted with the philosophy of science of Karl Popper through a high-school project supervised by Moshe Kroy from the Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University. In 1979, Shapiro completed his undergraduate studies in Tel Aviv University in mathematics and philosophy. Shapiro's PhD work with Dana Angluin in computer science at Yale university attempted to provide an algorithmic interpretation to Popper's philosophical approach to scientific discovery, resulting in both a computer system for the inference of logical theories from facts; and a methodology for program debugging, developed using the programming language Prolog. His thesis, "Algorithmic Program Debugging", was published by MIT Press as a 1982 ACM Distinguished Dissertation, followed in 1986 by "The Art of Prolog", a textbook co-authored with Leon Sterling.

Moving to the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1982 as a post-doctoral fellow, Shapiro was inspired by the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems project to invent a high-level programming language for parallel and distributed computer systems, named Concurrent Prolog. A two-volume book on Concurrent Prolog and related work was published by MIT Press in 1987.

In 1993, Shapiro took leave of absence from his tenured position at Weizmann to found Ubique Ltd. (and serve as its CEO), an early Israeli Internet software startup. Building on Concurrent Prolog, Ubique developed "Virtual Places", a 2D metaverse and social networking software that included instant messaging, chat rooms, collaborative browsing, online events and games, and voice-over-IP. Ubique was sold to America Online in 1995, and following a management buy out in 1997 was sold again to IBM in 1998.

Shapiro attempted to build a computer from biological molecules, guided by a vision of "A Doctor in a Cell": A biomolecular computer that operates inside the living body, programmed with medical knowledge to diagnose diseases and produce the requisite drugs. Being a novice to biology, Shapiro realized his first design for a molecular computer as a LEGO-like mechanical device built using 3D stereolithography, which was patented upon his return to Weizmann in 1998. During 1999–2016, Shapiro's lab was designing and implementing various molecular computing devices.

In 2011, Shapiro designed an effective method of synthesizing error-free DNA molecules from error-prone building blocks, and founded the CADMAD consortium (Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing of DNA libraries):

In 2005, Shapiro presented a vision of the next grand challenge in human biology: To uncover the Human cell lineage tree. The history of how the human body grows from a single cell (the fertilized egg) to 100 trillion cells is captured by the cell lineage tree. In his TEDxTel-Aviv talk "Uncovering The Human Cell Lineage Tree – The next grand scientific challenge" Shapiro described the system and results obtained with it so far, and a proposal for a FET Flagship project "Human Cell Lineage Flagship initiative" for uncovering the Human cell lineage tree in health and disease. The international Human Cell Atlas project, initiated by Shapiro's former Ph.D. student Aviv Regev, aims to address the precursor question of describing all cell types in the human body.