Ralf Jung, a doctoral student in the Foundations of Programming group, has accepted a position as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Congratulations Ralf!

Ralf's primary research interest is in developing formal foundations and tools that establish machine-checked guarantees for real-world software systems. To achieve this, his work spans all the way from foundational and deeply theoretical to applied, from proving theorems to developing tools used by other researchers and software developers.. You can find out more about his work at https://research.ralfj.de/.

MPI-SWS faculty member Rupak Majumdar has received the 2022 CONCUR Test-of-Time Award for his CONCUR 2003 paper on The Element of Surprise in Timed Games. The work was done in collaboration with Luca de Alfaro, Marco Faella, Thomas A. Henzinger, and Mariëlle Stoelinga.

The award citation reads as follows: "The paper studies concurrent two-player games played on timed game structures, and in particular the ones arising from playing on timed automata. A key contribution of the paper is the definition of an elegant timed game model, allowing both the representation of moves that can take the opponent by surprise as they are played "faster", and the definition of natural concepts of winning conditions for the two players -- ensuring that players can win only by playing according to a physically meaningful strategy. This approach provides a clean answer to the problem of time convergence, and the responsibility of the players in it. For this reason, it has since been the basis of numerous works on timed games. The algorithm established in the paper to study omega-regular conditions in this neat model of timed games is also enticing, resorting to mu-calculus on a cleverly enriched structure."

MPI-SWS faculty member Viktor Vafeiadis has received the 2022 Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, which is given by ACM SIGPLAN to recognize outstanding contributions by young investigators in the area of programming languages.  The award citation reads as follows:

"Viktor has become a world leader in semantics and verification research. His body of work includes fundamental and influential contributions to the study of concurrency, in particular separation logic and relaxed memory models. His landmark doctoral thesis developed RGSep, the first extension of concurrent separation logic to support formal proofs about fine-grained concurrent algorithms.  His work on Cave presented the first fully automatic verifier for establishing linearizability of a class of concurrent data structures, including ones with non-fixed linearization points. His work on CompCertTSO presented the first verified compiler for a concurrent language under a relaxed memory model. He developed the first direct (and mechanized) proof of soundness for concurrent separation logic (CSL) based on operational semantics—beautifully simple compared to prior proofs and a key enabler for proving soundness of more advanced program logics like CAP and Iris. He developed the first separation logic for the C/C++ relaxed memory model—a tour-de-force achievement compared to the standard CSL which assumes sequential consistency. This spawned a whole body of work on modular verification of concurrent data structures under relaxed memory models. His work has found and corrected a number of serious flaws in the C/C++ concurrency model, which led to changes in the C++ standard. And his "promising" semantics for relaxed-memory concurrency offered one of the first viable solutions to the 30-year-old "out-of-thin-air" problem and spawned much follow-on work. His work on GenMC presented the first efficient model checkers for relaxed-memory C/C++ programs with optimality guarantees about their state space exploration. Recent work together with his postdoc Azalea Raad (now faculty at Imperial), presented the first "persistency semantics" for non-volatile memory on multicore architectures. Viktor is not only highly-cited and incredibly prolific—he is also a true pioneer, repeatedly exploring dauntingly technical problems in the semantics and verification of concurrent programs before others dare to try."

This award makes MPI-SWS the only institution in the world to boast two recipients of the SIGPLAN Milner award among its faculty.

Two MPI-SWS faculty, Maria Christakis and Elissa Redmiles, have earned highly competitive Google Research Scholar awards. Maria Christakis's award was given for her research on metamorphic specification and testing of machine-learning models and Elissa Redmiles's award was given for her research on aligning technical data privacy protections with user concerns.

The Google Research Scholar Program provides unrestricted gifts of up to $60,000 to support research at institutions around the world and is focused on funding world-class research conducted by early-career professors. Award proposals go through an internal, merit-based review process and selected faculty can receive a Google Research Scholar award only once in their career. Award recipients are assigned a liaison at the company to share findings with and as a point of contact for further collaboration.

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.

MPI-SWS scientific director Joël Ouaknine was appointed as a Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the largest computer science association in the world, Joel, who leads the “Foundations of Algorithmic Verification” research group, was appointed ACM fellow for his contributions to algorithmic analysis of dynamical systems.

ACM has also elected as Fellows two researchers from our neighboring Max Planck Institute for Informatics: Thomas Lengauer is recognized for contributions to bioinformatics and medical informatics and Bernt Schiele is recognized for contributions to large-scale object recognition, human detection, and pose estimation.

The ACM Fellows program recognizes the 1% of ACM members who have made the most outstanding achievements in the field of computer and information technology. Worldwide 71 new ACM Fellows were elected this year, twelve of them in Europe, four in Germany and three of them in Saarbrücken.

Further Information: 

• https://www.acm.org/media-center/2022/january/fellows-2021


• https://awards.acm.org/fellows/award-winners


• https://www.mpi-sws.org/people/joel/

Bob Harper, an MPI-SWS external scientific member, has received the 2021 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award---the most significant international career award in programming languages. He received the award for his "foundational contributions to our understanding of type theory and its use in the design, specification, implementation, and verification of modern programming languages".

Award Citation:

Robert (Bob) Harper is widely known for his foundational contributions to our understanding of type theory and its use in the design, specification, implementation, and verification of modern programming languages. Bob demonstrated that sound type systems and operational semantics are not only appropriate vehicles for reasoning about idealized languages, but that this theory can be applied to complex, modern languages. His achievements include analysis of language features ranging from references to continuations to modules, the definition of a variety of new type systems, the idea of using types throughout the compilation process, the analysis of run-time system semantics and cost, a formal definition of Standard ML and its mechanization, the definition of logical framework LF and other logical frameworks based on homotopy type theory.

Some of Bob’s most influential work involved the design, theory and implementation of the TIL (Typed Intermediate Language) compiler system, which pioneered the idea that compilers can propagate type information to lower-level intermediate languages, where it can be used to guide optimizations and to catch compiler bugs. These ideas led directly to the development of proof-carrying code, typed assembly language, and a wide array of type-preserving compilers.

Bob Harper has also had a profound impact though his mentorship, teaching and the influence of his books “Programming in Standard ML” and “Practical Foundations for Programming Languages.”