An Exclusive: Prof. Joseph Sifakis- the Man Who Changes the World of Computer Science!

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Alfie Dsouza, Team Mangalorean.
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An Exclusive: Prof. Joseph Sifakis- the Man Who Changes the World of Computer Science!

An Exclusive: Computer Scientist, Researcher and Laureate of the 2007 Turing Award, Joseph Sifakis- the Man Who Changes the World of Computer Science!

Mangaluru: Born in Greece, but presently a French Citizen, Prof Joseph Sifakis is a computer scientist and researcher, laureate of the 2007 Turing Award, (along with Edmund M. Clarke and Ernest Allen Emerson) for his work on model checking, a verification method of computer hardware and software properties. The Turing Award is recognized as the Nobel Prize of Computing.

Sifakis was one of the speakers at the just concluded 5-day “Sahyadri Conclave” which was held from 6th January till 10 January, where he while addressing the Computer Science & Information Science participants, discussed about “Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution and impact of Internet of Things (IoT)” in daily life, where he emphasized on construction of a IoT system along with the risk factors. He stressed on the key features about the Technological convergence, the vision and also on the scientific and technical challenges with respect to IoT. He mentioned that currently, IoT is used in many applications to communicate between electronic devices.

Prof. Joseph Sifakis is Emeritus Senior CNRS Researcher at Verimag. His current research interests cover fundamental and applied aspects of embedded systems design. The main focus of his work is on the formalization of system design as a process leading from given requirements to trustworthy, optimized and correct-by-construction implementations. He has been a full time professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) for the period 2011-2016. He is the founder of the Verimag laboratory in Grenoble, which he directed for 13 years.

Verimag is a leading research laboratory in the area of embedded systems, internationally known for the development of the Lustre synchronous language used by the SCADE tool for the design of safety-critical avionics and space applications. In 2007, Professor Joseph Sifakis has received the Turing Award for his contribution to the theory and application of model checking, the most widely used system verification technique today. He has participated in many major industrial projects led by companies such as Airbus, EADS, France Telecom, Astrium, and STMicro Electronics.

Sifakis is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, a member of the French National Academy of Engineering, a member of Academia Europea, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is a Grand Officer of the French National Order of Merit, a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. He has received the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 2012. Joseph Sifakis has received the Award of the Hellenic Parliament Foundation for Parliamentarism and Democracy in 2009. He is a commander of the Greek Order of the Phoenix. He has been the President of the Greek Council for Research and Technology for the period February 2014 – April 2016.

Joseph Sifakis seen with Manjunath Bhandary

Sifakis works for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and is the founder of VERIMAG Laboratory in Grenoble. Moreover, he’s a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Grenoble and Honorary Professor of the University of Lausanne and the University of Patras. In March 2014, he was appointed as the President of the new National Council for Research and Technology, Greece. Sifakis’ work is characterized by an unusual recurrent pattern: the problem is first studied from an abstract, foundational point of view, which leads to methods and techniques for its solution, which, in turn, leads to an effective implementation that is successfully used in multiple industrial applications.

Sifakis was born in Heraklion, Crete-Greece, on December 26th, 1946 and later studied Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Athens and Computer Science at the University of Grenoble under a French scholarship. During his studies in France, he acquired the French citizenship and has since been living and working in the country. VERIMAG Laboratory is a leading research laboratory in the area of critical embedded systems. It developed the underlying theory and technology for the SCADE tool, used by Airbus for the design and validation of its critical real-time systems, and is becoming a de facto standard for aeronautics.

Verimag has a lasting and strategic collaboration with ST Microelectronics, France Telecom R&D and Airbus, through which numerous results on validation and testing have been transferred. Joseph Sifakis is recognized for his pioneering work on both theoretical and practical aspects of Concurrent Systems Specification and Verification. He contributed to emergence of the area of model-checking, currently the most widely-used method for the verification of industrial applications. His current research activities include component-based design, modeling, and analysis of real-time systems with focus on correct-by-construction techniques.

Moreover, he’s the Scientific Coordinator of the European Network of Excellence ARTIST2 on Embedded Systems Design. This network gathers 35 of the best European teams in the area, and aims to produce innovative products. The French state honoured Sifakis with the titles of Grand Officer of the French National Order of Merit and Commander of France’s Legion of Honour. In 2009, Sifakis received the Greek Parliament Foundation for Parliamentarism and Democracy Award and in 2012 he was further honoured with the Leonardo Da Vinci Medal.

In the period 1988-2000, Sifakis extended this work to deal with modeling and verification of real-time systems. His main contributions include: the modeling and verification of hybrid systems – models combining discrete and continuous dynamics; -the development and implementation of the KRONOS model checker, the first symbolic model checker for timed automata; and the study of symbolic synthesis algorithms for timed automata.

Few hours before his departure from Mangaluru to the Airport to catch his flight to his hometown in France, Team Mangalorean had the opportunity to interact with Prof. Joseph Sifakis on certain points pertaining to Computer Science, and he obliged to answer a few queries. Introducing Prof. Joseph to a bevy of media persons who had converged at Hotel Ocean Pearl- Mangaluru on Monday, 15 January, Manjunath Bhandary, the Chairman of Bhandary Foundation/Sahyadri College of Engineering and Management said, ” Prof Joseph Sifakis is a legend in computer science. Even though he is a busy person, he obliged us by being one of the speakers at Sahyadri Conclave, which was the First and one of its kind in the history of Karnataka/Mangaluru. While he is about to go back to his Country, we thought why not have a meeting/interaction with the media, so that he could share more on Computer Science, which he might have missed to address during the conclave. And I am happy that he had obliged to spend some time with the media today”.

Following are the excerpts from the exclusive interview between Team Mangalorean and Prof. Joseph Sifakis:

Q: What made you to step in the field of Computer Science? Why did you leave your hometown in Greece, and migrate to France?

A: We are a generation that had visions. Most of us wanted to become scientists, we had ideals. At that time, science had another glamor and I wanted to be a researcher since childhood. Between 1964-’69 I was in the Technical University of Athens-Greece. Those years were difficult and my dream was to go abroad. I accomplished it a year later and I went to France. Initially, I went to study physics, but there I met Informatics. The machines that we had at the time were approaching the behavior of the human mind, they were smart machines and this charmed me! I had to work hard, like most Greeks fleeing abroad.

What I must acknowledge is that the French system, like other systems abroad, recognize people who work hard and give them a proper place in it. In Greece there are difficulties to recognize the value of someone’s work and no merit. In Greece we have competent researchers. The level of research is quite high and comparable to the research done in Europe. What is missing is the link between research and the real economy. That is a disadvantage to Greece.We have to fight to get something done in Greece, because it is our last chance. I’m optimistic, I know that there are obstacles, but I also know that many people in Greece are waiting for something to be done to get out of this impasse. We must modernize our economy. The modernization passes through the vision of innovation. Greece has the skills to succeed».

Q: As a renowned Scientist and a Researcher in Computer science field, what are your most recognized achievements?

A: While in France, I founded the Verimag laboratory in Grenoble. Verimag is a leading research laboratory in the area of embedded systems, internationally known for the development of the Lustre synchronous language used by the SCADE tool for the design of safety-critical avionics and space applications, and is becoming a de facto standard for aeronautics. In 2007, I received the Turing Award for my contribution to the theory and application of model checking, the most widely used system verification technique today. I have also participated in many major industrial projects led by companies such as Airbus, EADS, France Telecom, Astrium, and STMicroelectronics.

In 1998, I promoted the emergence of embedded systems, which has contributed to the constitution of an international and lively research community in this area. Later in the years, my main focus was on the formalization of system design as a process leading from given requirements to trustworthy, optimized and correct-by-construction implementations. The results led to the development of the BIP component framework for rigorous system design. The framework consists of a language and a set of tools including source-to-source transformers, a compiler and the D-Finder tool for compositional verification. BIP is unique for its expressiveness. It can describe mixed hardware/software systems. It uses a small and powerful set of primitives encompassing a general concept of system architecture. BIP was successfully used in several industrial projects, in particular for the componentization of legacy software and the automatic generation of implementations for manycore platforms.

Q: How do you rate India globally in the field of Computer science/IT?

A: India is very much advanced in the field of Computer Science globally. You will find renowned Indian Scientists and researchers wherever you go b=globally, including USA. Although India is still a relatively small player on the global scientific stage, its wide-ranging collaboration network and increasing share of the world’s main research performance indicators reflect its overall growth in output, impact and knowledge transfer. In terms of knowledge transfer, India shows a higher emphasis in areas of computer science, material science, chemistry and pharmacology, toxicology and pharmaceuticals. Knowledge transfer includes analyses of patent citation patterns and collaborations between academic and corporate research institutions.

As a whole, there is a promising trend as more Indian research is included in global journals and more institutes are regularly making appearances in such databases. It has also been seen that collaboration is expanding to not just include OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) partners, but others such as Brazil, China and Iran. India hols a very strong position globally in Computer Science, and this would also help for the growth of Computer Science in India too. Indians should also show interest in developing the growth in their own country too, and not just contribute their services to outside countries.

Q: How was the response from the students at the recently held ‘Sahyadri Conclave’?

A: Tremendous and overwhelming response from the student participators at the Conclave. They were all curious, strongly motivated and very much interested to learn more. I have travelled many countries, but during interactions, I find Indians and chinese more enthusiastic and eager to learn and gain more knowledge on the relevant topic- and not like students/teachers from Western or European countries.Indians pose more questions pertaining to the topic and are very much eager to grasp the contents and gain more knowledge. I was very much pleased and happy by the participation and enthusiasm shown by the Sahyadri Conclave student participants and others.

Q: How is the scope of Computer Science Engineering in 2020?

A: Did you know that the career in IT is considered as one of the most high paying jobs and is full of opportunities? 1,000,000 jobs by 2020; Computer Science is a top paying college degree; Computer programming jobs at 2X times at the national average; 1.4 million computing jobs. Computer science is one of the most sought after courses by students, well thanks to the software and IT boom of the past two decades. Apart from India, when we talk globally computer science has done pretty much a good job and have changed the entire scenario of the IT industry. Right from social media to the genomics revolution, computer science has played a central role in many of the technological innovations in the 21st century.

Since computer science is based on the fundamentals of mathematics, students develop critical reasoning and complex problem solving abilities that will help them in all walks of life. Some of the fundamentals of science are theoretical computer science, theory of computation, information and coding theory, algorithms and data structures, programming language theory, formal methods, applied computer science etc. and students can specialize in any one (or more) of these areas during their undergraduate or graduate studies. Presently, job opportunities are great for computer science students all over the world. Even during difficult times such as recession, a highly skilled and bright computer science professional will always be in demand. Chances are that many of the jobs will be automated and Robots will snatch snatch away many jobs, but there is no need to worry. There will still be millions of jobs available for Computer Science professionals.

Q: What would be your kind words of wisdom/message for the prospective/budding Computer Science professionals?

A: Always dream a vision, and also remember that human is unique. Find your way up in times of problems. Be ambitious, take a risk, because if you don’t take risk you will not succeed in your achievements in your life. Always look forward to make your dreams come true. Try to learn more on the subject of your career, follow the evolution of technology, your vision should procure with satisfaction and self-fulfillment. Computer Science is a fast growing field and in 2020 there will be billions of computer jobs. Your services are very much needed globally in the field of transportation, Industries, Agriculture, Hospitals, Medicine, etc- so you are in the right field of your career that you have chosen. Robots may invade and take away certain jobs, but you are still safe, because there will be still millions of jobs which would require human help. Once again, I would like to say, ‘Always Dream a Vision’, and Best of Luck in your endeavours”.

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