Joseph Sifakis facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Joseph Sifakis
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| Born | 26 December 1946 (age 78) |
| Citizenship | Greek-French |
| Alma mater | National Technical University of Athens University of Grenoble |
| Known for | Model checking |
| Awards | National Technical University of Athens University of Grenoble |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | CNRS, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne |
| Notable students | Stavros Tripakis |
Joseph Sifakis is a famous computer scientist from both Greece and France. He won a very important award called the Turing Award in 2007. He shared this award with Edmund M. Clarke and E. Allen Emerson. They received it for their amazing work on something called model checking.
About Joseph Sifakis
Joseph Sifakis was born in Heraklion, a city on the island of Crete in Greece, in 1946. He now lives in France. He studied Electrical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. Later, he studied Computer Science at the University of Grenoble in France, thanks to a French scholarship. He earned his first doctorate degree in 1974 and a second one in 1979 from the University of Grenoble.
He is currently a top research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in France. He works at the VERIMAG laboratory near Grenoble, which he also started. Sifakis is a leading expert in areas like model checking and embedded systems. Embedded systems are special computer systems built into other devices, like your phone or a car.
He helped create the CAV conference, which is a big meeting for computer scientists. The first CAV conference was held in Grenoble in 1989. He also led a European network called ARTIST, which focused on research about embedded systems from 2004 to 2012.
Sifakis also taught as a professor at the EPFL in Switzerland from 2011 to 2016. He was also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in China and SUSTech. From 2014 to 2016, he was the President of the Greek National Council for Research and Technology.
What Joseph Sifakis Worked On
Joseph Sifakis focused on making sure computer systems work correctly. This is called system verification. He used special methods called formal methods to design systems. In his early work, he studied the ideas behind model checking. This is a way to automatically check if a system design meets certain rules. In 1982, this technique was used to create a tool called CESAR.
Sifakis was the director of VERIMAG for 14 years. This lab worked with big companies like Airbus and Schneider Electric. They developed ways to create very safe systems, especially for things like airplanes. One important tool they helped create is called SCADE, which uses a programming language called Lustre.
He also worked with other famous scientists like Thomas Henzinger and Amir Pnueli. They worked on checking systems that deal with time and different types of signals. Sifakis helped develop many tools for checking systems, such as IF, Kronos, CADP, and TGV. He also developed theories to handle the "state explosion problem." This problem happens when a system has too many possible states, making it hard to check. He used abstraction techniques to simplify these complex systems.
More recently, his work has focused on building trustworthy systems using something called the BIP component framework. He is also working on designing reliable autonomous systems, like self-driving cars.
Awards and Honors
Joseph Sifakis has received many important awards and honors for his contributions to computer science:
- Turing Award, 2007
- Leonardo da Vinci Medal, 2012
- Grand Officer of the National Order of Merit, France, 2008
- Commander of the Legion of Honor, France, 2011
- Member of the French Academy of Sciences, 2010
- Member of Academia Europaea, 2008
- Member of the French Academy of Engineering, 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
