Recent Spotlights
Two new faculty to join MPI-SWS
We are pleased to announce that two new faculty will join MPI-SWS.
Recent highlights
Three best paper awards: Rupak Majumdar, along with his coauthors, has received two best paper awards: the EAPLS 2012 best paper award and the 2012 ACM TODAES best paper award. Krishna Gummadi and Farshad Kooti, along with Winter Mason and Meeyoung Cha, have received a best paper award at ICWSM 2012.
Two Google fellowships: Georg Neis won a 2012 Google PhD Fellowship for his work in Programming Technology. First year PhD student Ezgi Cicek was awarded an Anita Borg Scholarship.
Research in the news: A recent WWW 2012 paper by Krishna Gummadi, Bimal Viswanath, and their coauthors was covered by GigaOM, a popular technology news blog, in an article titled Who's to blame for Twitter spam? Obama, Gaga, and you. Stevens Le Blond's work on security flaws in Skype and other peer-to-peer applications has been receiving global media attention: WSJ, Le Monde (French), die Zeit (German), Daily Mail, NewScientist, Slashdot, Wired, and New Scientist.
MPI-SWS researchers win three best paper awards
Rupak Majumdar and Zhenyue Long, along with Georgei Calin and Roland Meyer at TuKL, havve received the ETAPS 2012 best paper award for their paper "Language-Theoretic Abstraction Refinement".
Rupak Majumdar has also received (along with Jason Cong, Bin Liu, and Zhiru Zhang) the 2012 ACM TODAES Best Paper Award for his 2010 TODAES article "Behavior-Level Observability Analysis for Operation Gating in Low-Power Behavioral Synthesis".
Krishna Gummadi and Farshad Kooti, along with Winter Mason and previous MPI-SWS postdoctoral fellow Meeyoung Cha, have received a best paper award at ICWSM 2012, for their paper "The Emergence of Conventions in Online Social Networks."
Two MPI-SWS students win Google fellowships
Georg Neis won a 2012 Google PhD Fellowship for his work in Programming Technology. First year PhD student Ezgi Cicek was awarded an Anita Borg Scholarship. They join MPI-SWS PhD student Juhi Kulshrestha, who received a 2011 Google Fellowship for her work in social networking.
MPI-SWS research in the news
Krishna Gummadi's WWW 2012 paper was covered by GigaOM, a popular technology news blog, in an article titled Who's to blame for Twitter spam? Obama, Gaga, and you.Steven le Blond's work on security flaws in Skype and other peer-to-peer applications has been receiving global media attention: WSJ, Le Monde (French), die Zeit (German), Daily Mail, NewScientist, Slashdot, Wired, New Scientist.
Visiting Professor Johannes Gehrke wins Humboldt Award
Johannes Gehrke, a professor at Cornell University, has been selected for a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This award will provide support for him to spend eight months in Germany, working with Peter Druschel and other MPI-SWS researchers on data-intensive distributed systems that make up the software infrastructure inside such large Web companies as Amazon, Yahoo! and Google.
The Humboldt Research Award is granted "in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future."
Björn Brandenburg wins EMSOFT best paper award
MPI-SWS faculty member Björn Brandenburg, along with James H. Anderson (UNC), has received the ACM SIGBED EMSOFT 2011 best paper award for his paper "Real-time resource-sharing under clustered scheduling: mutex, reader-writer, and k-exclusion locks."
Two test of time awards
Two MPI-SWS faculty have recently won prestigious test of time awards. Rupak Majumdar has received the ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation) Paper Award for 2011 and Paul Francis has received the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award for 2011.The ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential PLDI Paper Award is given each year for a paper that is ten years old and has been highly influential in the area of programming languages. Rupak's 2001 paper, "Automatic Predicate Abstraction of C Programs," was coauthored with Thomas Ball, Todd Millstein, and Sriram Rajamani. The paper presented the predicate abstraction technology underlying the SLAM project. The technology is now part of Microsoft's Static Driver Verifier in the Windows Driver Development Kit. This is one of the earliest examples of automation of software verification on a large scale and the basis for numerous efforts to expand the domains that can be verified.
The ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award recognizes papers published 10 to 12 years in the past in Computer Communication Review or any SIGCOMM sponsored or co-sponsored conference that is deemed to be an outstanding paper whose contents are still a vibrant and useful contribution today. Paul's 2001 paper, "A Scalable Content-Addressable Network," was coauthored with Mark Handley, Richard Karp, Sylvia Ratnasamy, and Scott Shenker. This paper is one of four highly influential papers that laid the foundation for P2P systems based on distributed hash tables (DHTs).
Three new faculty to join MPI-SWS
We are pleased to announce that three new faculty will join MPI-SWS this fall.
Two MPI-SWS alumni receive NSF CAREER awards.
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."
MPI-SWS study exposing Facebook privacy leak attracts global media attention
A study by MPI-SWS researchers Saikat Guha (now at Microsoft Research), Bin Cheng, and Paul Francis has been highlighted on CNN, NPR, The Washington Post, Fox News, and other major media outlets.The study, which will be presented at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in November, looks at the targeting behavior of Google and Facebook. While the goal of the study was to understand targeting in general, the researchers discovered that gay Facebook users can unknowingly reveal to advertisers that they are gay simply by clicking on an ad targeted to gay men. The ads appear innocuous in that they make no mention of targeting gay users (for instance, an ad for a nursing degree). A user's sexual orientation can be leaked even if the user made his sexual orientation private using Facebook's privacy settings.
This study was done as part of a broader research project to design techniques for making advertising more private.
Viktor Vafeiadis joins the MPI-SWS faculty
Viktor's research contributions include inventing new concurrent program logics (RGSep & deny/guarantee); developing automated verification tools (SmallfootRG & Cave) for proving correctness properties of concurrent algorithms; and verifying some particularly challenging algorithms manually (e.g., mcas), mechanically (e.g., fast congruence closure), or automatically (e.g., lazy set).
Viktor received his B.A. degree in Computer Science in 2004 and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 2008 both from the University of Cambridge. After that, he held post-doctoral research positions at Microsoft Research and at the University of Cambridge.
Robert Harper appointed as an external scientific member
The external scientific member appointment is a courtesy appointment, which acknowledges the member's scientific excellence, as well as his or her close collaboration and contribution to joint research projects with MPI-SWS faculty and researchers.
Robert Harper has been a professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University since 1988. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1985, and was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at Edinburgh University from 1985-1988. He is best known for his work on the design, definition, and implementation of Standard ML; the design and application of the LF logical framework; the type-theoretic foundations of modularity in programming languages; the use of typed intermediate languages for certified compilation; the co-invention of self-adjusting computation for dynamic algorithms; and the application of fundamental theory to practical software systems. His current interests include mechanization of the metatheory of programming languages, the integration of types and verification, and the application of programming language theory to computer security.
Andreas Haeberlen receives Otto Hahn Medal
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.
Umut Acar joins the MPI-SWS faculty
Such systems abound in many areas of computer science. For example, physical simulations often involve objects that move continuously over time, databases host and process data that changes over time (e.g., by introduction of new information records), and connectivity in networks and distributed systems changes as links go down or come alive.
Umut's primary research focus has been self-adjusting computation, where computations respond automatically to modifications to their data. With his collaborators, he designs languages for developing self-adjusting programs, researches techniques for analyzing their complexity, and evaluates the proposed techniques by considering problem domains such as computational geometry, machine learning, and scientific computing. Umut's other interests include parallel computing, databases, and design and implementation of high-level languages.
Umut Acar received his B.S. in Computer Science from Bilkent University-Turkey in 1997, his M.A. from University of Texas at Austin in 1999, and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004. Umut joins MPI-SWS from the Toyota Technological Institute of Chicago, where he was an assistant professor from 2005 to 2009.
Rupak Majumdar joins the MPI-SWS faculty
Rupak Majumdar joins the institute's faculty as a scientific director, effective June, 2010. Rupak's research interests are in computer-aided verification and control of reactive, real-time, hybrid, and probabilistic systems; software verification and programming languages; and logic and automata theory.
Rupak's research spans the spectrum of formal verification techniques, ranging from theoretical foundations of logic and automata theory to practical software engineering tools that systematically analyze thousands of lines of code for programmer errors. In the field of software model checking, Rupak has made major contributions. Rupak, along with Ranjit Jhala, wrote the the model checker Blast, which is able to analyze over 100,000 lines of code for complex temporal properties. This achievement was a major milestone and proof of feasibility in the field of software verification and led to a flurry of academic and industrial activity in the area.
Rupak joins MPI-SWS from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was on the faculty of the computer science department. Prior to that, Rupak received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and his B.Tech. degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur.
MPI-SWS graduates first four students
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.
Michael Backes awarded an ERC Starting Grant, selected by Technology Review as a "Young Innovator"
The ERC Starting Grant was established in 2007 by the European Research Council to support up-and-coming research leaders in Europe. Recipients are selected based upon "outstanding track-record of early achievements appropriate to their research field and career stage."
Michael's 2009 Young Innovator award is based on his work proving that Internet security protocols can really be trusted. Software designed by Backes' group can prove in less than a second whether an Internet protocol is truly secure.
Michael received his Ph.D. from Saarland University in 2002. He was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Zurich Research laboratory before accepting his current position as a professor at Saarland University in 2006. He was named a fellow of the Max-Planck Institute for Software Systems in 2007.
Ashutosh Gupta and Andrey Rybalchenko win EAPLS best paper award
MPI-SWS PhD student Ashutosh Gupta and faculty Andrey Rybalchenko, along with Rupak Majumdar (UCLA), have received the EAPLS best paper award for their TACAS'09 paper "From Tests to Proofs."The EAPLS award goes to the best contribution in the area of programming languages among CC, ESOP, and TACAS—three member conferences of ETAPS, the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software.
The award-winning paper describes the design and implementation of an automatic invariant generator that can be used in the verification of imperative programs. The authors' new approach makes constraint solving—and hence invariant generation—more scalable by adding information obtained from static abstract interpretation as well as dynamic execution of the program.
ETAPS, established in 1998, is a confederation of five annual conferences, accompanied by satellite workshops and other events. It is a primary forum for academic and industrial researchers working on topics relating to Software Science. Previous EAPLS best paper award winners are listed at http://www.eapls.org/pages/topic_05_awards/.
Peter Druschel wins Mark Weiser Award
MPI-SWS faculty and scientific director Peter Druschel has been honored as the eighth recipient of the Mark Weiser Award -- the top international award in the field of operating systems.
The Mark Weiser Award was established in 2001 by ACM's Special Interest Group on Operating Systems. Recipients must have begun their careers no earlier than 20 years prior to nomination, and they are selected based upon "contributions that are highly creative, innovative, and possibly high-risk, in keeping with the visionary spirit of Mark Weiser."
In the award ceremony, Peter's broad and high-impact contributions in his research field were highlighted, including work such as the Pastry peer-to-peer system, the Flash web server, the Fbufs operating system support for high-speed networking, and his work on resource management in large-scale servers.
Peter received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1994. He was a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University, before accepting his current position as the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.
Previous recipients of the Mark Weiser Award are Frans Kaashoek (MIT), Mendel Rosenblum (Stanford), Mike Burrows (Google), Brian Bershad (Univ. of Washington), Tom Anderson (Univ. of Washington), Dawson Engler (Stanford), and Peter Chen (Univ. of Michigan).
Paul Francis joins the MPI-SWS faculty
Paul Francis joins the institute's faculty as a scientific director, effective Jan 1, 2009. Paul's work over the years has focused on network routing and addressing problems, with a particular interest in large and self-configuring systems.
Paul's work has had tremendous impact on both research and industrial
practice. He is best known for inventing Network Address
Translation (NAT), shared multicast trees (which form the
basis of PIM-SM), and the use of multiple addresses to scale
routing in the face of site multihoming, which was adopted by
IPv6.
Paul joins MPI-SWS from Cornell University, where
he was on the faculty of the computer science department.
Prior to that, Paul spent many years in industry labs such as
Bellcore, NTT Research Labs in Tokyo, ACIRI in Berkeley, and
at several Silicon Valley startups.
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