Creation of joint French–Israeli computer science research unit

The Franco-Israeli FILOFOCS UMI was created this month and shall operate for five years. This research laboratory is dedicated to investigating the foundations of computer science with the aim of understanding its power as well as its limits. FILOFOCS research may also be applied to other fields of computer science, yielding tools for use in fields such as communication networks, bioinformatics, and quantum computing.

The new UMI is headquartered in Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Exact Sciences with research infrastructures also hosted by the other two participating Israeli institutions: the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science. The computer science departments of these three Israeli institutes are world famous, boasting among their research staff several winners of the Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize” for computer scientists.

FILOFOCS is the first CNRS UMI in Israel and the fruit of years of cooperation between the two countries. Its roots are in the earlier incarnation of FILOFOCS as a CNRS International Associated Laboratory (LIA), launched in 2012. FILOFOCS LIA brought together the CNRS, Paris Diderot University, and a single Israeli institution—Tel Aviv University—around shared projects. The new FILOFOCS UMI aims to pursue this scientific cooperation begun in 2012, which may spur similar initiatives in other fields.