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.

Our paper “A Greedy Approach for the Efficient Repair of Stochastic Models” by Shashank Pathak, Erika Ábrahám, Nils Jansen, Armando Tacchella, and Joost-Pieter Katoen was accepted at NFM 2015. The paper addresses the problem of model repair for parametric discrete-time Markov chains which consists of changing a model with minimal costs such that a desired property is satisfied. We present a […]

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.

Our paper “High-level Counterexamples for Probabilistic Automata” by Ralf Wimmer, Nils Jansen, Erika Ábrahám and Joost-Pieter Katoen was accepted for publication in the journal Logical Methods in Computer Science (LMCS). In this paper we investigate the computation of several variations of (minimal) counterexamples that are represented in PRISM’s high-level language which defines a subclass of probabilistic programs. These NP-hard problems are solved […]

The paper “Compositional Analysis Using Component-Oriented Interpolation” by Viet Yen Nguyen, Benjamin Bittner, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Thomas Noll has received the Best Paper Award at the 11th International Symposium on  Formal Aspects of Component Software (FACS 2014). It presents a novel abstraction technique that exploits the compositionality of a concurrent system consisting of interacting components.

The paper “Exponentially timed SADF: Compositional semantics, reduction, and analysis” by Joost-Pieter Katoen and Hao (Stephen) Wu has been accepted for EMSOFT’14 in New Delhi. The paper presents a compositional semantics of SADF using Markov automata, shows that non-determinism cannot occur, and exploits confluence reduction for scaling quantitative evaluation.

Sergey Sazonov, who completed his master thesis on “Property preservation under bisimulations on Markov Automata” at our chair, received an award of the CS department for completing his master studies with excellent grades. Congratulations!