The paper “Conditioning in Probabilistic Programming” by Friedrich Gretz, Nils Jansen, Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Annabelle McIver, and Federico Olmedo has been accepted at the 31st Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics Conference.  The paper provides an operational and wp-semantics for an imperative probabilistic programming language with conditioning, studies their relation, and shows its usage for program […]

Friday April 24, Falak Sher successfully defended his PhD dissertation, entitled “Abstraction and Refinement of Probabilistic Automata using Modal Stochastic Games” for a jury consisting of Lijun Zhang (ISCAS Beijing, China), Stefan Kowalewski, Erich Grädel, and Joost-Pieter Katoen (all Aachen).  Falak’s dissertation is concerned with game-based abstraction-refinement in which (instead of existing works) the underlying […]

The paper “A statistical approach for timed reachability in AADL models” by Harold Bruintjes, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and David Lesens (Airbus Defense & Space) has been accepted at the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2015, acceptance rate 21,8%). The paper presents a statistical model checker for checking timed and stochastic AADL models against […]

The paper “Model Checking of Open Interval Markov Chains” by Souymodip Chakraborty and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at the 22nd International Conference on Analytical & Stochastic Modelling Techniques & Applications (ASMTA 2015).  The paper shows that interval MCs with open intervals can be verified by re-using techniques for closed interval MCs.

Monday March 9, Jonathan Heinen successfully defended his PhD dissertation, entitled “Verification of Java Programs: A Graph Grammar Approach” for a jury consisting of Arend Rensink (Twente, NL), Thomas Seidl, Martin Grohe, and Joost-Pieter Katoen (all Aachen).  Jonathan’s dissertation deals with the automated verification of pointer operations in Java Bytecode programs using quantified LTL where […]

Carsten Kern, formerly a PhD student at Chair i2, recently obtained a Professorship at the Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule in Regensburg (Bavaria). We congratulate him with this success and wish him a lot of success in Regensburg!

On January 15, 2015, Arpit Sharma has successfully defended his dissertation on “Reduction Techniques for Nondeterministic and Probabilistic Systems”.  His defense committee consisted of Christof Löding, Holger Hermanns (Saarland University), Joost-Pieter Katoen and Bernhard Rumpe (see picture).  Arpit’s dissertation treats weighted lumpability as well as layering techniques for various models.

RWTH Aachen hosts the Young Researchers’ Conference “Frontiers in Formal Methods”, February 25-27 2015.  Young researchers (up to two years after completing their PhD thesis) are encouraged to submit a 2-5 page abstract by January 12, 2015 (extended firm deadline). More information can be found here.

Hongfei Fu has successfully defended his PhD dissertation entitled “Verifying Probabilistic Systems: New Algorithms and Complexity Results”.  Hongfei started his PhD research in autumn 2010.  His examiners were Antonin Kucera (Masaryk University, Brno), Wolfgang Thomas and Stefan Kowalewski (see picture).   

Mark Timmer received the award for the best PhD dissertation in 2013  in the region Overijssel, the Netherlands for his thesis Efficient Modelling, Generation and Analysis of Markov Automata.  Mark obtained his PhD degree from the University of Twente, and was supervised by Joost-Pieter Katoen, Jaco van de Pol and Marielle Stoelinga. See also http://www.utwente.nl/nieuwsevents/!/2014/11/350971/overijssel-phd-award-voor-mark-timmer.