Joseph Sifakis (Greek: Ιωσήφ Σηφάκης; born 26 December 1946) is a Greek-French computer scientist. He received the 2007 Turing Award, along with Edmund M. Clarke and E. Allen Emerson, for his work on model checking.
Biography Joseph Sifakis was born in Heraklion, Crete in 1946 and lives in France. He studied Electrical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and Computer Science at the University of Grenoble under a French scholarship. He received his engineering doctorate in 1974 from the University of Grenoble, where he also received a state doctorate in 1979.At the time when Joseph Sifakis was a graduate student, there existed in France two levels of PhDs, the higher one, the doctorat d'état ("state doctorate") being necessary to access professorships. It has since been replaced by the habilitation.:a b There were two science universities in Grenoble: the Université scientifique et médicale de Grenoble (USMG, Grenoble-1), which was later renamed to Joseph Fourier University, and the Grenoble Institute of Technology(INPG), later renamed to Grenoble-INP. VERIMAG is a joint laboratory of CNRS, Joseph Fourier University and Grenoble-INP.
He is currently Research Director Emeritus for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique at VERIMAG laboratory near Grenoble, of which he is the founder. Sifakis has been a leading figure in the fields of Model Checking and Embedded Systems. He founded with Edmund M. Clarke and Amir Pnueli the CAV conference, organized for the first time in Grenoble in 1989. He has been the coordinator of the ARTIST European Network of Excellence for research on Embedded Systems (2004–2012).
Sifakis held the INRIA-Schneider endowed industrial chair (2008–2011) and has been a full professor and the Director of the «Rigorous System Design Laboratory » at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences of EPFL (2011–2016). He has been visiting professor at Tsinghua University (2011–2012), and at SUSTech (2019).
Sifakis has been the President of the Greek National Council for Research and Technology (2014–2016).
Work Sifakis worked on system verification and the application of formal methods to system design. In his state doctorate he studied the principles of the algorithmic verification method known later as model checking. In 1982, this technique was applied in Jean-Pierre Queille's PhD to develop the CESAR verification tool.
Sifakis was the director of VERIMAG for fourteen years. Established initially as a mixed industrial laboratory between CNRS and Verilog SA., VERIMAG has collaborated with Airbus and Schneider Electric to develop methods and tools for the development of safety critical systems, in particular the SCADE synchronous programming environment based on the Lustre Language. Sifakis has worked on the verification of timed and hybrid systems with Thomas Henzinger and the synthesis of timed systems with Amir Pnueli and Oded Maler. He has participated to the development of verification tools including the IF toolset, Kronos, CADP, and TGV and has developed theory for coping with state explosion using abstraction techniques.
Over the past twenty years, his work has focused on rigorous component-based design using the BIP component framework and more recently the design of trustworthy autonomous systems, self-driving cars in particular. He is the author of the book Understanding and Changing the World, published by Springer in May 2022.
Awards and honors
Turing Award, 2007 Leonardo da Vinci Medal, 2012 Grand Officer of the National Order of Merit, France, 2008Decree of 16 May 2008 published in the Journal officiel de la République Française of 17 May 2008. Member of the French Academy of Engineering, 2008 Commander of the Legion of Honor, France, 2011Decree of 13 July 2011 published in the Journal officiel de la République Française of 14 July 2008.] Member of the French Academy of Sciences, 2010 Member of Academia Europaea, 2008 Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2015 Member of the National Academy of Engineering, 2017 Foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2019 Member of the National Academy of Sciences, 2024
References
External links
Personal homepage Official website Turing Award announcement List of publications: dblp: Joseph Sifakis