Anne-Kathrin Schmuck has been appointed as new tenure-track faculty as of July 1st, 2023, after leading a prestigious externally funded Emmy-Noether research group hosted at MPI-SWS since 2020. Her group conducts fundamental research at the intersection of control engineering, cybernetics, and computer science to develop reliable and performant control software for cyber-physical systems. In particular, her work addresses the challenge of orchestrating continuous physical components and discrete logical decision making units within these highly automated and safety-critical technological systems.

Anne has been part of the MPI-SWS faculty as an independent research group leader since 2020. She holds a Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.) degree in engineering cybernetics from OvGU Magdeburg, Germany and a Dr.-Ing. (Ph.D.) degree in electrical engineering from TU Berlin, Germany. She joined MPI-SWS as a postdoctoral researcher in the area of formal methods in 2015.

MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer and nine of his collaborators (including notably UdS/MPI alumnus Ralf Jung, as well as former MPI-SWS postdocs Jacques-Henri Jourdan and Aaron Turon and UdS/MPI student David Swasey) have received the 2023 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation for their seminal work on the Iris framework for higher-order concurrent separation logic, specifically the following four papers:

• Ralf Jung, David Swasey, Filip Sieczkowski, Kasper Svendsen, Aaron Turon, Lars Birkedal, Derek Dreyer: “Iris: Monoids and Invariants as an Orthogonal Basis for Concurrent Reasoning”. POPL 2015.
• Ralf Jung, Robbert Krebbers, Lars Birkedal, Derek Dreyer: “Higher-order ghost state”. ICFP 2016.
• Robbert Krebbers, Ralf Jung, Aleš Bizjak, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Derek Dreyer, Lars Birkedal: “The Essence of Higher-Order Concurrent Separation Logic”. ESOP 2017.
• Ralf Jung, Robbert Krebbers, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Aleš Bizjak, Lars Birkedal, Derek Dreyer: “Iris from the ground up: A modular foundation for higher-order concurrent separation logic”. J. Funct. Program. 28 (2018).

The Church Award has been given out since 2016, and has typically been given to papers that were 20-25 years old (to allow time for foundational work on logic to have major impact).  In this case, however, the four awarded Iris papers were published only 5-8 years ago! In that relatively short period of time, Iris has served as a springboard for a huge amount of research in semantics and program verification, including over 70 papers in top venues (see the Iris project page), and it has been adopted as a core verification technology by a multitude of research groups around the world, as well as the systems verification company BedRock Systems.

More details about the Alonzo Church Award and about the 2023 Church Award.

At ICALP 2023 and LICS 2023, two of the top conferences in logic and automata, there will be 6 papers by SWS researchers.

LICS 2023 (accepted papers: https://lics.siglog.org/lics23/accepted.php )

• Pascal Bergsträßer and Moses Ganardi. Revisiting Membership Problems in Subclasses of Rational Relations


• Faraz Ghahremani, Edon Kelmendi and Joël Ouaknine. Reachability in Injective Piecewise Affine Maps


• Toghrul Karimov, Edon Kelmendi, Joris Nieuwveld, Joël Ouaknine and James Worrell. The Power of Positivity

ICALP 2023 (accepted papers: https://icalp2023.cs.upb.de/accepted-papers/ )

• Marvin Künnemann, Filip Mazowiecki, Lia Schütze, Henry Sinclair-Banks and Karol Węgrzycki. Coverability in VASS Revisited: Improving Rackoff’s Bound to Obtain Conditional Optimality


• Pascal Baumann, Moses Ganardi, Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan Thinniyam Srinivasan and Georg Zetzsche. Checking Refinement of Asynchronous Programs against Context-Free Specifications


• George Kenison, Joris Nieuwveld, Joël Ouaknine and James Worrell. Positivity Problems for Reversible Linear Recurrence Sequences

 

Kaushik Mallik's thesis, entitled Pushing the Barriers in Controller Synthesis for Cyber-Physical Systems, has been recognized with the 2023 ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award. The award is given to the PhD student who has made the most original and influential contribution to the research areas in the scope of the ETAPS conferences, and has graduated at a European academic institution. Kaushik was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Rupak Majumdar.

This is the second time that the ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award was given to an MPI-SWS student. In 2021 it was awarded to Ralf Jung for his thesis on Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language, supervised by Derek Dreyer.