Biography

Achiya Elyasaf is a faculty member at the Institute of Software, Systems, and Security at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Ben-Gurion University (BGU), Israel. He received his academic degrees from BGU, all in computer science, and was a postdoc fellow in David Harel’s group at the Weizmann Institute. In 2021, he co-founded Provengo Technologies, which provides software-testing solutions based on his expertise in software engineering (SE) and artificial intelligence (AI). In his current research, Dr. Elyasaf seeks to discover new synergies between SE and AI, aiming to enhance their interoperability and contribute to both fields.

Dr. Elyasaf developed Context-Oriented Behavioral Programming, a novel paradigm for developing context-aware systems centered on a natural and incremental specification of behaviors. He also developed an approach for utilizing AI and expert knowledge to generate solvers for combinatorial games. This work was recognized as one of the most important achievements of AI in games, alongside famous achievements, such as Deep Blue’s win over Kasparov and Watson’s in Jeopardy! (N. Bostrom, 2014. “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies”).

Dr. Elyasaf won several prizes, including three HUMIES Awards, produced by the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (Gold, 2013; Gold, 2011; Bronze, 2009).