"It is a real pleasure and honor for me to read the laudatio for the awarding of the honorary doctorate in Computer Science to Patrick Cousot.
I first met Patrick over 30 years ago, when I was still a PhD student, in Paris, on the occasion of the presentation of my first article on abstract domains for the optimization of logic programs at an ACM conference. And I still remember the trepidation I had when at the moment of the questions Patrick raised his hand and... in a few words he questioned everything that seemed to me to be an important contribution to the scientific community.
This is something I have always appreciated about him: his clarity in trying to understand the actual relevance of the proposals, and the frankness in expressing his opinions.
Patrick Cousot is Engineer from École des Mines of Nancy, Doctor Engineer (PhD) in Computer Science and Doctor of Sciences in Mathematics from the University of Grenoble.
He was appointed, in France at the École Normale Supérieure in 1991, where he served as Director of the Computer Science educational activities and leaded the research on abstract interpretation and semantics, and at the École Polytechnique, where he headed the research laboratory LIX. He was appointed, in the US, at New York University in 2008.
Patrick Cousot was awarded the Silver Medal of the CNRS (1999), an honorary doctorate from the Fakultät Mathematik und Informatik of the Universität des Saarlandes (2001), the Grand Prix of Computer Science and its Applications of the EADS Corporate Research Foundation attributed by the French Academy of Sciences (2006) and a Humboldt Research Award (2008). 
Patrick Cousot is the inventor with Radhia, his wife that we all remember with affection, of Abstract Interpretation, a theory of sound approximation of mathematical structures, in particular those involved in the behavior of computer systems. Abstract Interpretation allows the systematic derivation of sound methods and algorithms for approximating undecidable or highly complex problems in various areas of computer science: semantics, verification and proof, model-checking, static analysis, program transformation and optimization, typing, etc.
Abstract interpretation-based static analysis, which automatically infers dynamic properties of computer systems, has been very successful these last years to automatically verify complex properties of real-time, safety critical, embedded systems in the vehicle, avionic, nuclear and space industry, in particular thanks to the ASTRÉE system, which is used to check the absence of runtime errors in the electric flight control software of commercial planes.
By quoting what Patrick says at the end of his monumental book on Principles of Abstract Interpretation, published by MIT press a few months ago, “sound static analysers provide a guarantee on the final result of a software development, and they are also very useful during the development phase for early bug detection. The main obstacle to the wide adoption of static analysers is that programmers are never held responsible for their errors, even when the human and economic consequences are huge. Contrary to other disciplines, software engineers are guaranteed qualified immunity, under the pretext that verification is beyond best practice. The rule is rapid development with user debugging and distant updates. If best practice included the mandatory use of standards and qualified tools, programmers and their hierarchy could be held accountable for bugs automatically discoverable by such tools.”
Well, the theory of Abstract Interpretation is indeed the solid ground to develop such tools. 
We are grateful for Patrick's immense scientific contribution and also for inspiring the scientific activities of many of us, who are in this room today, from many different countries.
It is for the fundamental results obtained in the theory of Abstract Interpretation and in its applications to the development of static analyzers that it is proposed to confer an honorary doctorate in Computer Science to Patrick Cousot."