Joseph Sifakis

Biosketch

Dr Joseph Sifakis is Emeritus Research Director at Verimag. He has been a full professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) for the period 2011-2016. He is the founder of the Verimag laboratory in Grenoble, a leading laboratory in the area of safety critical systems that he directed for 13 years.

Joseph Sifakis has made significant and internationally recognized contributions to the design of trustworthy computing systems in many application areas, including avionics and space systems, telecommunications, and production systems. His current research focuses on autonomous systems, in particular self-driving cars and autonomous telecommunication systems.

In 2007, he received the Turing Award, for his contribution to the theory and application of model checking, a widely used system verification technique.

Joseph Sifakis is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the French National Academy of Engineering, Academia Europea, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is a Grand Officer of the French National Order of Merit, a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. He is a Commander of the Order of the Phoenix. He received the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 2012.

Joseph Sifakis is a frequent speaker at international scientific, technical and public forums. He is a consultant to ICT companies and public institutions. He is the author of the book “Understanding and Changing the World” published by Springer Nature in May 2022.

Research Interests

Dr. Sifakis' research on the design and validation of trustworthy computing systems focuses on foundations providing a rigorous framework for their development, as well as on methods for validating their properties, in particular their safety and security. Theoretical contributions cover modeling languages for component-based computing systems, in particular the description of their dynamic and adaptive behavior. They also concern the study of modal logics for the expression of systems' technical requirements, and the underlying verification methods. These results have been applied to numerous tools for the development of critical systems in avionics, space and telecommunications. In particular, Model-Checking, gave rise to a highly effective verification technology that is widely adopted in the hardware and software industries.

Over the past ten years, Dr. Sifakis' research has focused on the development and validation of autonomous systems for automotive and telecommunications applications. The aim of this work is to lay the foundations for the construction of intelligent systems with guaranteed trustworthiness.