Joseph Sifakis

Sifakis has been the President of the Greek National Council for Research and Technology (2014–2016).

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 is currently a visiting professor at SUSTech University.

Joseph Sifakis (Greek: Ιωσήφ Σηφάκης) 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.

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 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 Ph.D. to develop the CESAR verification tool.

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.