November 22^nd saw Distinguished Visiting Professor Joseph Sifakis of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at Southern University of Science and Technology was elected as a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The 2007 Turing Award Winner was one of 20 foreign members to be elected, along with 64 Chinese nationals who became CAS academicians.

Professor Joseph Sifakis joined SUSTech in 2018 and will soon launch his “Turing Master Class” program using his knowledge of cross-disciplinary fields to promote the development of intelligent scientific and technological industries, while striving to cultivate interdisciplinary thinking skills. The program will focus on fields such as artificial intelligence, computing and big data, while considering multi-disciplinary projects in biology, electronics, automation and other such fields to give play to the development of intelligent science and technology.

Students coming out of his program will be the future leaders with interdisciplinary thinking and the ability to be comprehensive innovative designers that can implement scientific and engineering solutions for the betterment of society.

On November 1^st, the Sifakis Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (RITAS) received approval from the Shenzhen city government at the Shenzhen Talent Bole Awards. It seeks to cover cutting-edge fields such as computational intelligence, trusted software, autonomous driving, smart cities, and intelligent healthcare. Embedded with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), it will develop a new generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications while collaborating with the Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Computational Intelligence. The resultant research will ultimately contribute to the cultivation of high-end scientific and technological talent, Shenzhen’s technical improvement, and the dual development of Shenzhen and the Greater Bay Area.

Professor Sifakis is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the French National Academy of Engineering, Academia Europea, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering (USA). He has long been engaged in a wide range of computer science fields such as rigorous system design, component-based construction, and model checking, in which he has made original and pioneering achievements. He won the Turing Award in 2007 for his contribution to the theory and application of model checking, the most widely used system verification technique today.