Antoine Petit was appointed Chairman and CEO of Inria for a term of five years. PhD and Professor (‘classe exceptionnelle’) in Computer Science, he was formerly Deputy Managing Director of Inria.
He joined Inria in July 2006 to head the Paris-Rocquencourt Research Centre, later acting as interim Director of the Saclay Research Centre from March to September 2010. As Deputy Managing Director, he coordinated relations with supervisory ministries and institutional partnerships with research bodies, businesses, and local authorities, in France and abroad. He has also been in charge of training through research programmes.
Antoine Petit specializes in formal methods, mainly transition system based methods, for the specification and verification of parallel and real-time systems.
He is also a keen sports lover, particularly of rugby.