Current work

Teaching Computer Science

Biography

Phil Janson got a BS in EE from the U. of Brussels and MS, EE, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. From 1976 to 1996 he held a tenured visiting lecturer position in Operating Systems at the U. of Brussels. In 1976 he joined IBM Research in Zurich, where he worked initially on high-speed packet switches and the IBM Token Ring. In 1986 he worked on OS/2 LAN gateways at the IBM Development Lab in Austin, Texas. Back in Zurich in 1987 he managed several projects on heterogeneous networking and IT security. In 1995 he became head of the new Computer Science Department at IBM Research's Zurich Lab, which he built up until 1999, with a focus on IT security, smart cards, pervasive computing and e-business. In 1995 he was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology, of which he was Vice President in 2000 and 2001, serving at the same time as Program Manager for University Relations at IBM Research's Zurich Lab. From 1995 to 2007 he was also Relationship Manager for Europe between IBM Research and the IBM Financial Services Sector. In 2001 he became a member of the Advisory Board of the Informatics and Communication Systems Dept of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technolgy in Lausanne (EPFL) and was elected to the Research Council of the Swiss National Foundation. From 2002 to 2004 he returned to an active research career as Senior Technical Staff Member, working on Web Services security. From 2004 to 2007 he was Program Manager for leveraging IBM Research Assets in IBM Global Services engagements. From 2007 to 2009 he managed a Research team focusing on user-centric identity and authentication technologies. He retired from IBM then joined EPFL as a Professor, teaching IT security engineering and Introductory Computer Science until 2017. Since then he is teaching cybersecurity to the Swiss armed forces. He holds a dozen patents and wrote over 50 papers in the areas of IT security and distributed systems as well as a book on Operating Systems. He received a Harkness Fellowship in 1972, and a number of IBM Invention and Outstanding Technical Contribution Awards since then. He is a member of the ACM and of the IEEE Computer Society.