MPI-SWS PhD students Michalis Kokologiannakis and Michael Sammler have accepted tenure-track faculty positions at ETH Zurich and the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, respectively.

Michalis Kokologiannakis, a doctoral student in the Software Analysis and Verification group, has accepted a tenure-track faculty position at ETH Zurich. Michalis is broadly interested in programming languages, compilers, weak memory models, and software verification. More specifically, he is interested in developing novel algorithmic techniques for verifying concurrent software, while also taking into account the weak memory models employed by modern microprocessors. You can find out more about his work at https://people.mpi-sws.org/~michalis/.

Michael Sammler, a doctoral student in the Foundations of Computer Security and Foundations of Programming groups, has accepted a tenure-track faculty position at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). Before starting at ISTA, he will spend one year as a postdoctoral fellow in the Programming Methodology Group at ETH Zurich. Michael's research interests lie in implementing efficient and practical systems and formally proving properties about them. In particular, his research focuses on building formal verification tools for low-level systems code that combine foundational proofs in a proof assistant with a high degree of automation. You can find out more about his work at https://people.mpi-sws.org/~msammler/ and https://ista.ac.at/en/research/sammler-group/.

Congratulations Michael and Michalis!

Pramod Bhatotia, who completed his doctoral studies at MPI-SWS, has received the 2023 EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award.

The EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award was created in 2014 by ACM EuroSys to reward junior European researchers who have demonstrated exceptional creativity and innovation in systems research, broadly construed. The award is given annually at the EuroSys conference, in memory of Jochen and his fundamental contributions to the systems community. The award is accompanied by a 2,000 EUR cash prize generously provided by RedHat.

Congratulations, Pramod!

Georg Zetzsche, head of the MPI-SWS Models of Computation group, has been awarded a 2022 ERC Starting Grant. Over the next five years, his project FINABIS will receive funding of 1.48 million euros for research on "Finite-state abstractions of infinite-state systems." Read more about the FINABIS project below.

In addition, MPI-SWS and University of Saarland alumnus Pramod Bhatotia, who is currently a professor at TU Munich, has also received a 2022 ERC Starting Grant for his project "DOS: A Decentralized Operating System".

ERC grants are the most prestigious and the most competitive European-level awards for ground-breaking scientific investigations. This year, less than 14% of all ERC Starting Grant applicants across all scientific disciplines received the award, with only 17 awardees in Computer Science across all of Europe and Israel!

These grants carry substantial research funding -- each winner receives up to 1.5 Million Euros over a period of 5 years to carry out their research. You can find more information about 2022 ERC Starting Grants here: https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/starting-grants-2022-call-results

The FINABIS Project

A fundamental question in computing is: What can programs find out algorithmically about other programs? If we want to analyze arbitrary programs, the answer is long known and simple: Essentially nothing. However, in recent decades, we have seen that if we restrict the class of analyzed programs, there is a rich variety of approaches to checking various important properties.

Understanding how to restrict the analyzed programs (while retaining as much expressivity as possible) has gained practical importance in the area of software verification. Here, algorithms for analyzing programs can be used to automatically check their correctness.

The available approaches to analyze programs typically transform a given program into an abstract model of computation. To account for program behaviors for all possible inputs, this usually results in models with infinitely many states. Designing algorithms that can work with such infinite-state systems poses a challenge. For example, we still do not have a clear picture of which types of infinite state spaces permit checking simple safety properties. In formal terms: For which infinite-state systems is reachability decidable?

In the FINABIS project ("Finite-state abstractions of infinite-state systems"), we are studying ways to transform infinite-state systems into finite-state systems that preserve some pertinent aspects of the original system. Understanding such transformations helps in two ways: First, finite-state systems are easier to work with algorithmically. So if our transformation preserves enough of the original system's behavior, we can simply analyze the finite system instead. Second, the specific transformations we study (subword closures and separability problems), and how we study them, are closely connected to understanding the decidability and complexity of reachability and also several other long-standing open problems in theoretical computer science.

Ralf Jung, a doctoral student in the Foundations of Programming group, has accepted a position as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Congratulations Ralf!

Ralf's primary research interest is in developing formal foundations and tools that establish machine-checked guarantees for real-world software systems. To achieve this, his work spans all the way from foundational and deeply theoretical to applied, from proving theorems to developing tools used by other researchers and software developers.. You can find out more about his work at https://research.ralfj.de/.

Viktor Vafeiadis, head of the MPI-SWS Software Analysis and Verification group, has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant. Over the next five years, his project "PERSIST: A Semantic Foundation for Persistent Programming" will receive almost 2 million euros, which will allow the group to develop rigorous formal foundations for programs interacting with non-volatile memory. Read more about the PERSIST project below.

One of the other recipients of an ERC Consolidator Grant this year is an MPI alumnus: Neel Krishnaswami was an MPI-SWS postdoc with Derek Dreyer, and he is currently a faculty member at Cambridge.

ERC grants are the most prestigious and the most competitive European-level awards for ground-breaking scientific investigations. This year, less than 14% of all ERC Consolidator Grant applicants across all scientific disciplines received the award, with only 15 awardees in Computer Science across all of Europe! The ERC Consolidator Grant offers funding for researchers with 7 to 12 years of experience after achieving a PhD. You can find more information about ERC Consolidator Grants awarded this year at https://erc.europa.eu/news/CoG-recipients-2020.

The European Research Council (ERC) is a pan-European funding body that supports cutting-edge research. It offers funding for groundbreaking research projects of the highest scientific quality across Europe, across all research areas. Talented researchers from all over the world can receive funding for excellent research in Europe.

The PERSIST Project

Non-volatile memory (NVM) is an emerging technology that provides orders of magnitude faster access to persistent storage (which preserves its contents after a crash or a power failure) than hard disks.  As such, it is expected to radically change how modern applications manage storage, moving away from traditional block-structured file systems to in-memory persistent data structures.

The problem with NVM, however, is that its programming model is standing on very shaky foundations. The persistency semantics of the mainstream architectures is unclear and full of counterintuitive behaviours, which makes writing correct NVM programs a very challenging task.

The project's goal is to develop a solid mathematical basis for determining the semantics of NVM programs and for reasoning about their correctness. More specifically, the plan is to produce:

• Formal persistency models for mainstream hardware architectures,
• Formal persistency models for mainstream programming languages,
• Firmly-grounded higher-level abstractions to ease persistent programming, and
• Effective testing and verification techniques for persistent programs (e.g., program logics and model checking).

Aastha Mehta, a doctoral student in the Distributed Systems group and the Security & Privacy group, has accepted a position as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Congratulations Aastha!

Aastha's research interests span systems security, data privacy, operating systems, and distributed systems. She has worked on building systems for ensuring policy compliance and for mitigating network side-channel leaks in online services. You can find out more about her work at https://people.mpi-sws.org/~aasthakm/.

• Alan Mislove (PhD 2009) is now an Associate Professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
• Andreas Haeberlen (PhD 2009) is now an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
• Bryan Ford (Postdoc 2009) is now an Associate Professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland.
• Meeyoung Cha (Postdoc 2010) is now an Associate Professor at KAIST in Daejon, South Korea.
• Boris Köpf (Postdoc 2010) is now a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK.
• Matthew Hammer (PhD 2012) is now an Assistant Professor at The University of Chicago in Illinois, USA.
• Chung-Kil Hur (Postdoc 2012) is now an Associate Professor at Seoul National University in Seoul, South Korea.
• Neel Krishnaswami (Postdoc 2012) is now a Lecturer at the University of Cambridge in the UK.
• Nuno Santos (PhD 2013) is an Assistant Professor at IST, University of Lisbon in Portugal.
• Beta Ziliani (PhD 2013) is a faculty member at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and a researcher at CONICET in Argentina.
• Aaron Turon (Postdoc 2014) heads the the Rust Development Team at Mozilla Research. Aaron is based in Portland, Oregon, USA.
• Pedro Fonseca (PhD 2015) is an Assistant Professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA.
• Pramod Bhatotia (PhD 2015) is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK.
• Cheng Li (PhD 2016) is a faculty member at the USTC (The University of Science and Technology of China) in Hefei, China.
• Dmitry Chistikov (Postdoc 2016) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick in the UK.
• Rayna Dimitrova (Postdoc 2017) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Leicester in the UK.
• Sadegh Soudjani (Postdoc 2017) is an Assistant Professor at Newcastle University in the UK.
• Vinayak Prabhu (Postdoc 2017) is an Assistant Professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA.
• Mainack Mondal (PhD 2017) is a faculty member at IIT Kharaghpur in West Bengal, India.
• Oana Goga (Postdoc 2017) is a researcher at CNRS in Grenoble, France.
• Riju Sen (Postdoc 2017) is an Assistant Professor at IIT Delhi in India.
• Ori Lahav (Postdoc 2017) is a Senior Lecturer at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
• Mitra Nasri (Postdoc 2018) is an Assistant Professor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Congratulations, everyone! We are proud that MPI-SWS alumni have spread far and wide, pursuing successful research careers all across the globe.

Two MPI-SWS alumni — Andreas Haeberlen and Alan Mislove — have received NSF CAREER awards. The CAREER award is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.

Andreas Haeberlen, now an Assistant Professor in the department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has received the award for his proposal "Evidence in Federated Distributed Systems."

Alan Mislove, now an Assistant Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University, has received the award for his proposal "Systems for the Emerging Patterns of Content Exchange."

Andreas Haeberlen has been awarded the 2009 Otto Hahn Medal for outstanding scientific achievement. The medal, and its accompanying monetary prize, will be presented to Andreas at the Max Planck society's annual General Assembly in Hannover on June 16. Andreas's medal was awarded for "pioneering work on accountability in distributed computer systems, in particular for the design, implementation and demonstration of practical techniques for the reliable and tamper-proof detection of complex faults. Andreas obtained his PhD in Spring 2009 and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Founded in 1948, the Max Planck Society is a non-profit scientific organization affiliated with the Max Planck Institutes. The Society awards the Otto Hahn Medal annually to young scientists in recognition of outstanding scientific achievement. In addition to a stipend, the award gives winners preference for grants enabling them to conduct research abroad for one year.

In the spring of 2009, MPI-SWS graduated its first four PhD students—Andreas Haeberlen, Alan Mislove, Animesh Nandi, and Atul Singh. All four students have landed competitive academic or research positions in a very tight job market.

This fall, Andreas Haeberlen will be an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Alan Mislove will be an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, Animesh Nandi will be a researcher at Bell Labs, India, and Atul Singh will be a researcher at NEC Labs, Princeton. The students received their PhD degrees from Rice University after spending the last several years of their graduate studies at MPI-SWS.