CNRS researcher wins prestigious computing award
An EU-funded researcher at the French national centre for scientific research (CNRS) has been selected as one of three winners of the prestigious Turing award by the American Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Dr Josef Sifakis is the first French citizen to be awarded the prize that is often described as the Nobel Prize for computing since its creation in 1966. All three winners, Dr Sifakis as well as his American colleagues Dr Edmund M Clarke of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Dr E Allan Emerson of the University of Texas, work in the area of model checking, a technology that helps hardware and software engineers to find errors in complex system designs. They received the award worth about €170,000 in recognition of their 'role in developing model checking into a highly effective verification technology, widely adopted in the hardware and software industries', the citation said. ACM president Stuart Feldman added that the work of Clarke, Emerson and Sifakis had had a major impact on designers and manufacturers of semiconductor chips. 'These industries face a technology explosion in which products of unprecedented complexity have to operate as expected for companies to survive. This verification advance enabled these industries to shorten time to market and increase product integrity. Without the conceptual breakthrough pioneered by these researchers, we might still be stuck with chips that have many errors and would lack the power and speed of today's equipment. This is a great example of an industry-transforming technology arising from highly theoretical research.' 'Intel and the entire computing industry have been direct beneficiaries of the awardees' ground-breaking work,' Andrew Chien, Vice President in the Corporate Technology Group and Director of Research of Intel Corporation, added. 'Our researchers and engineers have worked closely with Clarke, Emerson, and Sifakis for 15 years. Insights from their novel automatic verification results have been widely adopted by the entire industry. These model checking approaches provide dramatically better coverage when searching for design errors.' 'Google, like any contemporary technology company, owes a great deal of its success to the work of pioneering researchers who have come before,' said Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google. 'We are proud to honour the award winners for their innovative solution to a difficult and pervasive issue and we hope this will encourage and inspire those who now face the technology challenges of the future.' Dr Sifakis is currently CNRS research director and chair of 'Chamber B' (Public Research Organisations) of the ARTEMISIA Association for R&D (research and development) actors, which is involved in the EU-funded ARTEMIS ('Advanced research and technology for embedded intelligence and systems') initiative. He is also the founder of the VERIMAG laboratory in Grenoble, France, a leading research laboratory in the area of critical embedded systems. From 2004 to 2008, Dr Sifakis was the scientific coordinator of the Artist2 European Network of Excellence on Embedded Systems Design and has taken up the same position in the new ArtistDesign European Network of Excellence on Embedded Systems Design. Dr Sifakis, who was born on the island of Crete, Greece, holds a degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Athens as well as a diploma in Computer Science from the University of Grenoble, where he also did his PhD.
Countries
France