Rachid Guerraoui (born January 5, 1967) is a Moroccan-Swiss

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and a

Full Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a 'person who professes'. Professors ...

in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at EPFL, known for his contributions in the fields of

concurrent Concurrent means happening at the same time. Concurrency, concurrent, or concurrence may refer to: Law * Concurrence, in jurisprudence, the need to prove both ''actus reus'' and ''mens rea'' * Concurring opinion (also called a "concurrence"), a ...

and

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

. He is an

ACM Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

and an associate (area) editor of the ''

Journal of the ACM The ''Journal of the ACM'' (''JACM'') is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering computer science in general, especially theoretical aspects. It is an official journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. Its current editor-in-chief is ...

''. In 2018–19, he held the position of Chair in Informatics and Computational Science for Distributed Computing at the

Collège de France The (), formerly known as the or as the ''Collège impérial'' founded in 1530 by François I, is a higher education and research establishment () in France. It is located in Paris near La Sorbonne. The has been considered to be France's most ...

Education and career

Guerraoui was born on January 5, 1967, in

Rabat Rabat (, also , ; ) is the Capital (political), capital city of Morocco and the List of cities in Morocco, country's seventh-largest city with an urban population of approximately 580,000 (2014) and a metropolitan population of over 1.2 million. ...

Morocco Morocco, officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It has coastlines on the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria to Algeria–Morocc ...

. His father, Mohammed Guerraoui, is a teacher of mathematics and former ''wali'' (governor) of

Marrakesh Marrakesh or Marrakech (; , ) is the fourth-largest city in Morocco. It is one of the four imperial cities of Morocco and is the capital of the Marrakesh–Safi Regions of Morocco, region. The city lies west of the foothills of the Atlas Mounta ...

. His mother, Fatima Rahmoun-Guerraoui, is a teacher of French. After getting his baccalaureate in 1984, he left Morocco for France. Guerraoui earned simultaneous Master’s degrees in Computer Engineering from the École supérieure d'informatique électronique automatique (ESIEA) and in Computer Science from the

Pierre and Marie Curie University Pierre and Marie Curie University ( , UPMC), also known as Paris VI, was a public research university in Paris, France, from 1971 to 2017. The university was located on the Jussieu Campus in the Latin Quarter of the 5th arrondissement of Paris, ...

in 1989, supported by a scholarship at the ''Centre de Recherche'' of the

École des Mines École or Ecole may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * Éco ...

of Paris. In 1992, he earned his PhD from the

Université d’Orsay Paris-Sud University (), also known as the University of Paris — XI (or as the Orsay Faculty of Sciences, University of Paris before 1971), was a French research university distributed among several campuses in the southern suburbs of Paris, ...

, advised by Christian Fluhr and supported by the

French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, or CEA ( French: Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives), is a French public government-funded research organisation in the areas of energy, defense and sec ...

of Saclay. His doctoral dissertation was titled ''Programmation Répartie par Objets : Études et Propositions''. He then started as a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL and was appointed to the computer science faculty in 1999, after stints at

HP Labs HP Labs is the exploratory and advanced research group for HP Inc. HP Labs' headquarters is in Palo Alto, California and the group has research and development facilities in Bristol, UK. The development of programmable desktop calculators, ink ...

and

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

. Guerraoui's honors include an ERC Advanced Grant Award (2013), the Google Focused Award (2014), the Middleware 2014 Best Paper and 10-Years Best Paper Awards, and the Dahl–Nygaard Senior Prize (2024). He was named an

in 2012 and was appointed Chair in Informatics and Computational Science for Distributed Computing, 2018–2019, by the

—the first Moroccan to receive either appointment. With various collaborators, Guerraoui has written several technical and general-audience books: * * * * * * * He is also an associate (area) editor of the ''

''. Guerraoui also works on the popularization of computer science. With his doctoral student El Mahdi El Mahmdi, he created the Wandida project, a collection of permissively licensed educational videos on YouTube. Guerraoui maintains strong ties to Morocco through his participation in the public debate and the Moroccan political life. In December 2019, he was appointed by King Mohammed VI as a member of the Special Committee on Model of Development.

Focal research areas and main publications

Guerraoui worked on establishing theoretical foundations of

Transactional Memory In computer science and computer engineering, engineering, transactional memory attempts to simplify concurrent programming by allowing a group of load and store instructions to execute in an linearizability, atomic way. It is a concurrency control ...

(TM). He co-defined a concept he called opacity, used for establishing correctness of TMs. On the practical side, he co-devised elastic transactions and co-designed SwissTM, a throughput-efficient software transactional memory (STM) as well as a benchmark for TM systems, STMBench7. Earlier, Guerraoui studied scalable information dissemination methods. His paper on lightweight epidemic broadcast was the first to consider the partial and/or out-of-sync views of different processes in a gossip-based distributed system. This paper, together with Guerraoui's paper on the underlying membership service, gained over 1250 citations combined as of 2018, among which a number of theory papers on the analysis of gossip protocols in realistic settings. Rachid Guerraoui has a proven record of investigating the foundations of asynchronous distributed computations. For instance, Guerraoui co-established lower bounds for asynchronous gossiping and renaming. He further proved fundamental results on the relationships between classical distributed computing problems, such as atomic commitment and consensus, for which he helped close the then open problem of the weakest failure detector for consensus with any number of faults and co-established a new classification of distributed computing problems. Guerraoui further co-defined a general methodology to build highly concurrent asynchronous data structures and has shown how asynchrony can help build pseudo-random numbers. Guerraoui invented the mathematical abstraction of indulgence to precisely capture the essence of asynchronous algorithms of which safety does not depend on timing assumptions, such as Lamport's

Paxos Paxos () is a Greek island in the Ionian Sea, lying just south of Corfu. As a group with the nearby island of Antipaxos and adjoining islets, it is also called by the plural form Paxi or Paxoi (, pronounced in English and in Greek). The main t ...

or Castro- Liskov's PBFT. Guerraoui used that concept to co-define a general framework for secure and reliable distributed protocols.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Guerraoui, Rachid 1967 births 20th-century Moroccan scientists 21st-century Moroccan scientists Living people Academic journal editors Academic staff of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne 2012 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Hewlett-Packard people Massachusetts Institute of Technology people Moroccan computer scientists Swiss computer scientists People from Rabat Academic staff of the Collège de France Pierre and Marie Curie University people Paris-Sud University alumni Researchers in distributed computing