Achiya Elyasaf's Homepage

Short biography

Achiya Elyasaf is a Lecturer at the Software and Information Systems Engineering Department, Ben-Gurion University (BGU), Israel. He received his academic degrees from BGU, all in computer science, and was a postdoctoral fellow in David Harel’s group at the Weizmann Institute. In 2021, he co-founded Testory technologies. The company provides software-testing solutions that are based on his expertise in software engineering (SE) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Dr. Elyasaf developed Context-Oriented Behavioral Programming (COBP) – a novel paradigm for developing context-aware systems, centered on a natural and incremental specification of context-dependent behaviors. He also developed an approach that utilizes expert knowledge for evolving powerful solvers to combinatorial games. This work has been recognized as one of the most important achievements of AI in games, placed next to other famous achievements, such as the wins of Deep Blue over Kasparov and IBM’s Watson in Jeopardy! (Nick Bostrom, 2014. “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies”) In his current research, Dr. Elyasaf seeks new synergies between SE and AI to improve the interoperability between the two and contribute to each of them. Specifically, he devises methods and tools that will enable the development of systems that leverage big data on the one hand and domain knowledge on the other.

Dr. Elyasaf won several prizes, including the I-CORE in Algorithms Fellowship of the Israeli Council for Higher Education (CHE) and the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), an IEEE Outstanding Paper Award, and three HUMIE Awards — Human-Competitive Results Produced by Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (Gold, 2013; Gold, 2011; Bronze, 2009).