Seminarios de Investigación Severo Ochoa

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.
Joseph Sifakis 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, 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, 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. Joseph Sifakis has had numerous administrative and managerial responsibilities both at French and European level. He has actively worked to reinvigorate European research in embedded systems as the scientific coordinator of the « ARTIST » European Networks of Excellence, for ten years. He has participated in many major industrial projects led by companies such as Airbus, EADS, France Telecom, Astrium, and STMicroelectronics. Joseph 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 in 2009 the Award of the Hellenic Parliament Foundation for Parliamentarism and Democracy. 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.

Bio: Toyotaro Suzumura is a research scientist and technical lead of the Network Science and Big Data Analytics Department at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York, USA as well as a visiting full professor at Barcelona Supercomputing center in Spain, a visiting research scientist at the University of Tokyo.He has broad knowledge and experience in the research and development of computer science including big data processing in large-scale distributed systems, parallel and distributed middleware and its application to real-time data stream computing, large-scale graph processing, cloud computing, and various performance optimization technologies, design and implementation of dynamic scripting language and object-oriented parallel language and large-scale traffic simulation. Dr. Suzumura has been working for IBM Research since 2004 for 13 years after finishing his Ph.D. in 2004. As for his academic career, he had been appointed as a visiting associate professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2009 supervising 16 graduate students in his own laboratory “Suzumura Laboratory” and also a visiting associate professor of University College Dublin in Ireland since 2014/04 supervising 10 master students and 3 Ph.D. students.

Since 2013/10, he has worked for IBM Research – Ireland, the R&D headquarter of IBM Research in Europe as an international assignment specifically focusing on a variety of Smarter-Cities related technologies. Since 2015/04, he joined the headquarter of IBM Research - IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as a full-time research staff member and been leading a team of large-scale graph processing platforms. He has published over 60 reviewed research papers including top-quality international conferences and workshops as well as serving on numerous program committees and as workshop/track/area chair for top-tier conferences. He will be a program chair for IEEE BigData 2017. He is co-principal investigator on Japanese government projects. One of his notable achievements is that he and his team won the first place at the world competition of “Big Data” processing on supercomputers called “Graph500” (http://www.graph500.org) in June 2014, June and November 2015, and June and November 2016.