Sifakis, Joseph

Joseph Sifakis, (born Dec. 26, 1946, Iráklion, Crete, Greece), Greek-born French computer scientist and cowinner of the 2007 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science.

Sifakis earned a bachelor’s degree (1969) in electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and a master’s degree (1972) and a docteur ingénieur (1974) in computer science from the Université Scientifique et Medicale de Grenoble (also known as the University of Grenoble I, or Grenoble-1; now renamed Université Joseph Fourier), France. In 1979 he earned a doctorat d’état (roughly equivalent to an habilitation degree) in mathematics (computer science specialization) from Grenoble-1 and the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble. Sifakis soon became a research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and founder (1993) of Verimag Labs, an academic research laboratory in Gières, France, that is affiliated with CNRS and the Université Joseph Fourier. In 2008 Sifakis was given the new research chair for intelligent onboard systems at the French Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) in Grenoble.

Sifakis and, independently in the United States, Edmund M. Clarke and his former graduate student Ernest Allen Emerson were cited in the Turing Award for their work in 1981 on model checking software, which is used to automate the detection of logic errors in sequential circuit designs and in software.