Recent Spotlights
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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