Annual Report 2007/2008 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH ...

New Professors
Not least thanks to the UMIC Cluster of Excellence, we could welcome six new professors.
In the following the new colleagues introduce themselves with a brief description of their
research fields and some biographical information.
Erika Ábrahám
I joined the Computer Science Department at the RWTH
Aachen in October 2008 as a junior professor. The new
research group I am heading was initiated in the context of
the Excellence Initiative at RWTH Aachen, and is devoted
to the theory of hybrid systems.
Hybrid systems are systems with combined discrete
continuous behaviour. They accompany our everyday life:
The space heating gets switched on and off by some
discrete sensors in order to keep the temperature, a
continuous physical quantity, in a certain intervall.
A more complex example is the real, continuous behaviour
of our cars, that is controlled by embedded discrete control
units. With the increasing application of such systems
formal methods for hybrid systems, the research area of
my group, become more and more important at international research institutions as well as in
the industry.
I got my master degree (Diploma) 1999 with award from the Christian-Albrechts-University
Kiel. The topic of my master thesis was in the field of artifical intelligence. I continued my
studies as a doctoral student in Kiel, working on deductive proof methods for hybrid systems
as well as for programming languages. At that time I was member of the group headed by
Prof. Dr. Willem-Paul de Roever. Besides him, I closely collaborated with Dr. Martin
Steffen from the chair, and within the German-Dutch research project MobiJ also with
researchers from the CWI Amsterdam and from the University of Leiden (from which I
received my Ph.D. 2005). I was also participating in the European Omega project (Correct
Development of Real-Time Embedded Systems).
During my Ph.D. I moved to Freiburg 2002 and enjoyed the hospitality in the group of Prof.
Dr. David Basin at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg. In 2005 I joined the group of
Prof. Dr. Bernd Becker in Freiburg and started working in the context of the DFG SFB project
AVACS (Automatic Verification and Analysis of Complex Systems). My main research area
was bounded model checking for hybrid systems. From spring 2006 till autumn 2007 I was a
guest at the RWTH Aachen in the group of Prof. Dr. Joost-Pieter Katoen. During the last year
before I joined the RWTH I was associated with the Forschungszentrum Jülich.
I am married and have two wonderful children Judith (12) and Andras (9), who are also very
interested in computers, at least in playing and chatting. My hobbies are my children, reading,
hiking, and painting.
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