2018-annual-report

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annual report
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César Sánchez
Associate Research Professor
Pierre Ganty
Associate Research Professor
Aleks Nanevski
Associate Research Professor
César Sánchez received a Ph.D.
degree in Computer Science from
Stanford University, USA, in 2007.
His thesis studies the applications
of formal methods for guaranteeing
deadlock freedom in distributed
algorithms. After a post-doc
at the University of California at
Santa Cruz, USA, César joined the
IMDEA Software Institute in 2008.
He become a Scientific Researcher
at the Spanish Council for Scientific
Research (CSIC) in 2009. In
2013, he was promoted to Associate
Professor at the IMDEA Software
Institute.
César holds a degree in Ingeniería
de Telecomunicación (MSEE)
from the Technical University of
Madrid (UPM), Spain, granted
in 1998. Funded by a Fellowship
from La Caixa, he moved to
Stanford University, USA, receiving
an M.Sc. in Computer Science
in 2001, specializing in Software
Theory and Theoretical Computer
Science. César was the recipient of
the 2006 ACM Frank Anger Memorial
Award, and he enjoyed a Juan
De La Cierva Fellowship between
2008 and 2009.
Research Interests
César’s general research interests
are the applications of logic, games
and automata theory for the development,
the understanding, and
the verification of computational
artifacts. In particular, César’s
main line of research is the use
of formal methods for reactive
systems with emphasis on concurrent,
embedded and distributed
systems. His foundational research
includes the temporal verification
of concurrent datatypes and distributed
systems, runtime verification
and applications, and rich
specification languages for modern
complex software.
Pierre holds a joint Ph.D. degree in
Computer Science from the University
of Brussels, Belgium and from
the University of Genova, Italy that
he obtained late 2007. After his
Ph.D., Pierre did a nearly two-year
postdoc at the University of California,
Los Angeles. Pierre joined
the IMDEA Software institute in
the Fall 2009 as a tenure-track
assistant research professor. He
was granted tenure and promoted
to associate research professor in
December 2015. Currently he is
supervising two Ph.D. students.
Research Interests
Pierre is interested in automated
verification whose goal is to prove
the absence of errors in idealized
models of computing systems in a
fully automated way. Pierre focuses
on models with infinitely many
states which naturally arise when
control or data is unbounded. He
is also interested in formal language
theory and its applications
to practical problems like searching
text stored in compressed
form. Pierre’s contributions range
from theoretical results all the way
down to implementation of analysis
algorithms.
Aleks Nanevski obtained his
Ph.D. in Computer Science from
Carnegie Mellon University, and
held postdoctoral research positions
at Harvard University and
Microsoft Research in Cambridge,
before joining IMDEA in 2009.
He is a recipient of Ramon y Cajal
award in 2010, and an ERC consolidator
grant in 2016.
Research Interests
Aleks’ research focus is on developing
type-theoretic ideas on how we
should develop and structure mathematical
proofs about properties
of programs, especially programs
utilizing shared-memory concurrency.
Structuring proofs builds
on the philosophy of structured
programming, to identify linguistic
concepts that are frequently used
in the practice of formal proving,
but are arguably harmful. Such
concepts should be replaced by
better ones that provide proofs with
more structure, and improve on the
proof’s conciseness, readability,
development effort and maintainability,
just like structured programming
improved the very same
aspects of programming. Ultimately,
these ideas will enable software
development practice where verifying
that one’s programs works correctly
will be a simple, natural, and
expected process