Derek Dreyer, head of the Foundations of Programming research group since 2008, has been appointed as a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and Scientific Director of MPI-SWS as of May 1, 2022.

Derek became known for his pioneering work in programming languages and verification, with a particular emphasis on building rigorous foundations for establishing the reliability and correctness of realistic software systems.  In recent years, he and his group have become especially well known for their work on the Iris and RustBelt verification frameworks, both implemented in the Coq proof assistant.  Developed initially in 2015, Iris is a system for developing and deploying higher-order concurrent separation logics; though only 7 years old, it has already been used in over 60 papers published in top venues in programming languages.  One of the most significant applications of Iris is RustBelt, which constitutes the first formal, machine-checked foundation for verifying the safety of the increasingly popular systems programming language Rust.  These large-scale verification efforts place Dreyer's group at the forefront of programming languages research worldwide.

Derek has received numerous accolades for his research, teaching, and service, including the 2017 ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, a 2015 ERC Consolidator Grant, multiple Distinguished Paper Awards at top conferences like POPL, PLDI, and OOPSLA, the OOPSLA'18 Distinguished Reviewer Award, and most recently, the "Busy Beaver Award" at Saarland University for outstanding commitment to teaching. Under his mentorship, members of his group have also received numerous awards, including the prestigious ACM SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award and ACM Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention Award (for Dr. Ralf Jung).

Derek was born in New York City in 1980.  He holds a Bachelor's in Mathematics and Computer Science from New York University and received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. From 2005 to 2007, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.  He joined MPI-SWS as a tenure-track faculty in January 2008, only a few years after the Institute's founding, and has been an integral member ever since. We are thus very proud to be able to retain him as a Scientific Director of the institute.

Björn Brandenburg is the general chair of the 26th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS'20), to be held as part of CPSWeek 2020 in Montreal, Canada from April 22 to April 24, 2020.

RTAS is a top-tier conference with a focus on systems research related to embedded systems or timing issues. The scope of RTAS’20 ranges from traditional hard real-time systems to embedded systems without explicit timing requirements, including latency-sensitive systems with informal or soft real-time requirements.

Björn Brandenburg is the program chair of the 25th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS'19), to be held as part of CPSWeek 2019 in Montreal, Canada from April 16 to April 18, 2019.

RTAS is a top-tier conference with a focus on systems research related to embedded systems or timing issues. The broad scope of RTAS’19 ranges from traditional hard real-time systems to embedded systems without explicit timing requirements, including latency-sensitive systems with informal or soft real-time requirements.

Björn Brandenburg and Sriram Sankaranarayanan (University of Boulder, CO) are co-chairs of the 2018 ACM SIGBED International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT'18), to be held in conjunction with Embedded Systems Week (ESWEEK) from October 1-3 in Turin, Italy.

EMSOFT brings together researchers and developers from academia, industry, and government to advance the science, engineering, and technology of embedded software development. Since 2001, EMSOFT has been the premier venue for cutting-edge research in the design and analysis of software that interacts with physical processes, with a long-standing tradition for results on cyber-physical systems, which compose computation, networking, and physical dynamics. See the ESWEEK homepage for further details.

Robert de Simone (INRIA) and Björn Brandenburg are co-chairs of the 2017 ACM SIGBED International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT'17), to be held in conjunction with Embedded Systems Week (ESWEEK) from October 15 until October 20 in Seoul, South Korea.

EMSOFT brings together researchers and developers from academia, industry, and government to advance the science, engineering, and technology of embedded software development. Since 2001, EMSOFT has been the premier venue for cutting-edge research in the design and analysis of software that interacts with physical processes, with a long-standing tradition for results on cyber-physical systems, which compose computation, networking, and physical dynamics. See the ESWEEK homepage for further details.