Four papers to appear at OOPSLA'18 have been (co)-authored by MPI-SWS members.

• Horn-ICE Learning for Synthesizing Invariants and Contracts. Deepak D'Souza, Ezudheen P, Pranav Garg, Daniel Neider, P. Madhusudan.


• Randomized Testing of Distributed Systems with Probabilistic Guarantees. Burcu Kulahcioglu Ozkan, Rupak Majumdar, Filip Niksic, Mitra Tabaei Befrouei, Georg Weissenbacher.


• Reconciling High-level Optimizations and Low-level Code in LLVM. Juneyoung Lee, Chung-Kil Hur, Ralf Jung, Zhengyang Liu, John Regehr, Nuno P. Lopes.


• Persistence Semantics for Weak Memory. Azalea Raad, Viktor Vafeiadis.

The RustBelt project, kindly supported by an ERC Consolidator Grant, is looking to fill several open PhD and Postdoc positions.

POSTDOCS: We are seeking exceptional candidates with a strong, internationally competitive track record of research in programming languages and/or verification.  The primary criterion is quality, but I am particularly interested in candidates who have specialized expertise in one or more of the following areas:

- Rust
- substructural/ownership type systems
- verification of concurrent programs
- weak/relaxed memory models
- interactive theorem proving in Coq
- compiler verification

Experience programming in Rust is a welcome bonus, but not required.

STUDENTS: We are seeking exceptional candidates who have at least some background in programming language theory and/or formal methods, and who are eager to work on deep foundational problems with the potential for direct impact on a real, actively developed language.  A bachelor's or master's degree is required.  For more details about the MPI-SWS graduate program, see here: https://www.mpi-sws.org/graduate-studies/.

Successful applicants will join the Foundations of Programming group, led by Derek Dreyer at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)
in Saarbruecken, Germany.  Current and former postdocs in the group have included Andreas Rossberg (co-designer of WebAssembly), Chung-Kil Hur, Neel Krishnaswami, Aaron Turon (manager of the Rust project at Mozilla), Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Ori Lahav, Pierre-Marie Pédrot, and Azalea Raad.  Current and former PhD students in the group have included Georg Neis, Beta Ziliani, Scott Kilpatrick, David Swasey, Ralf Jung, Jan-Oliver Kaiser, Hoang-Hai Dang, Marko Doko, and @pythonesque.  The RustBelt project benefits from longstanding active collaborations with Viktor Vafeiadis (MPI-SWS), Lars Birkedal (Aarhus University), Chung-Kil Hur & Jeehoon Kang (Seoul National University), Deepak Garg (MPI-SWS), and Robbert Krebbers (TU Delft), as well as the many contributors to the Iris project (http://iris-project.org).

The working language at MPI-SWS is English.

Application deadline: OCTOBER 31.  If you are interested in joining the RustBelt team and want to learn more about the project, please contact Derek Dreyer directly at dreyer@mpi-sws.org.  To apply for a postdoc (or PhD student) position, please submit a CV (and/or grade transcript), research statement (or statement of purpose), and list of references to https://apply.mpi-sws.org.

For further information, see the project web page at: http://plv.mpi-sws.org/rustbelt/

In 2018, MPI-SWS researchers authored a total of five POPL papers:

• Parametricity versus the Universal Type. Dominique Devriese, Marco Patrignani, Frank Piessens.


• Effective Stateless Model Checking for C/C++ Concurrency. Michalis Kokologiannakis, Ori Lahav, Kostis Sagonas, Viktor Vafeiadis.


• Monadic refinements for relational cost analysis. Ivan Radicek, Gilles Barthe, Marco Gaboardi, Deepak Garg, Florian Zuleger.


• Why is Random Testing Effective for Partition Tolerance Bugs? Rupak Majumdar, Filip Niksic.


• RustBelt: Securing the Foundations of the Rust Programming Language. Ralf Jung, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Robbert Krebbers, Derek Dreyer.

Furthermore, with the "RustBelt" paper, MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer cements a 10-year streak of having at least one POPL paper each year, breaking the all-time record of 9 years previously held by John Mitchell at Stanford. Congratulations Derek!