Rachid Guerraoui

Rachid Guerraoui
Born	(1967-01-05) January 5, 1967 Rabat, Morocco
Occupation(s)	Computer scientist, professor
Years active	1992–present
Known for	Contributions to concurrent computing and distributed computing; co-introduced opacity in transactional memory; co-designed SwissTM
Notable work	Robust Machine Learning: Distributed Methods for Safe AI (2024), Algorithms for Concurrent Systems (2018)

Rachid Guerraoui (born January 5, 1967) is a Moroccan-Swiss computer scientist and Full Professor at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at EPFL. He is renowned for his contributions to concurrent computing and distributed computing. Guerraoui holds the distinction of being an ACM Fellow and serves as an associate editor for the Journal of the ACM. Between 2018 and 2019, he occupied the Chair in Informatics and Computational Science for Distributed Computing at the Collège de France.

Education and career

Hailing from Rabat, Morocco, Guerraoui obtained two Master’s degrees in 1989: one in Computer Engineering from École supérieure d'informatique électronique automatique (ESIEA) and another in Computer Science from Pierre and Marie Curie University. He earned his doctorate at Université d’Orsay in 1992, with support from the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, focusing his thesis on distributed object programming. Following postdoctoral work at EPFL and research roles at HP Labs and MIT, he joined EPFL's faculty in 1999.

His accolades include an ERC Advanced Grant awarded in 2013, a Google Focused Award in 2014, multiple Middleware Best Paper Awards in 2014, and the Dahl–Nygaard Senior Prize in 2024. In 2012, he was honored as an ACM Fellow, becoming the first Moroccan to be appointed to a Chair at the Collège de France.

Guerraoui has authored numerous books addressing both specialized and broader audiences on topics such as distributed computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Significant publications include Robust Machine Learning: Distributed Methods for Safe AI (2024) and Algorithms for Concurrent Systems (2018), reflecting his impact on academic research as well as practical applications.

Committed to advancing computer science education, he supports initiatives like the Wandida project that provides freely accessible educational videos. Maintaining a strong connection to Morocco, he was appointed by King Mohammed VI in 2019 to serve on the Special Committee on Model of Development.

Focal research areas and main publications

Guerraoui has played a pivotal role in shaping the theoretical underpinnings of Transactional Memory (TM). He co-introduced the notion of opacity, a key correctness criterion for TM systems. On the practical side, he contributed to developing elastic transactions and co-designed SwissTM, an efficient software transactional memory system, along with the TM benchmark STMBench7.

Earlier in his career, Guerraoui concentrated on scalable data dissemination techniques. His influential work on lightweight epidemic broadcast was among the first to incorporate partial or outdated views within gossip-based distributed systems. Together with research on foundational membership services, these studies have amassed over 1250 citations and significantly influenced realistic models of gossip protocols.

His expertise extends to asynchronous distributed computations where he co-established fundamental lower bounds for asynchronous gossiping and renaming problems. Guerraoui demonstrated essential connections between distributed computing challenges such as atomic commitment and consensus. His efforts contributed to resolving the open question concerning the weakest failure detector required for consensus under fault conditions and helped develop a novel classification scheme for distributed computing problems. Additionally, he co-developed frameworks for constructing highly concurrent asynchronous data structures and revealed how asynchrony can facilitate pseudo-random number generation.

Guerraoui introduced the concept of indulgence, a mathematical abstraction characterizing asynchronous algorithms whose safety guarantees do not depend on timing assumptions—examples include Lamport's Paxos and Castro-Liskov's PBFT protocols. Utilizing this framework, he co-developed a comprehensive approach for designing secure and dependable distributed protocols.