2018-annual-report

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annual report
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Alessandra Gorla
Assistant Research Professor
Zsolt István
Assistant Research Professor
Niki Vazou
Assistant Research Professor
Alessandra Gorla received her
Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in
computer science from the University
of Milano-Bicocca in Italy. She
completed her Ph.D. in informatics
at the Università della Svizzera
Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland
in 2011. In her Ph.D. thesis she
defined and developed the notion
of Automatic Workarounds, a selfhealing
technique to recover Web
applications from field failures, a
work for which she received the
Fritz Kutter Award for the best
industry-related Ph.D. thesis in
computer science in Switzerland.
Before joining IMDEA Software
Institute in December 2014 as an
assistant research professor, she
has been a postdoctoral researcher
in the software engineering group
at Saarland University in Germany.
During her postdoc, she has also
been a visiting researcher at Google
in Mountain View.
Research Interests
Alessandra’s research interests
are in software engineering, and in
particular on testing and analysis
techniques to improve the reliability
and security of software systems.
She is also interested in malware
detection for mobile applications.
Zsolt received his PhD Degree in
2018 from ETH Zürich, Switzerland.
His dissertation, entitled
“Building Distributed Storage with
Specialized Hardware”, was awarded
with the prestigious ETH Medal
by the university. Before joining
IMDEA Software as an Assistant
Research Professor, he worked
as a visiting researcher at IBM
Rüschlikon, Switzerland. Prior to
his doctoral studies, he completed
the Master’s degree in Computer
Science (Distributed Systems) at
ETH Zürich, Switzerland, in 2013,
and the Bachelor’s degree in Computer
Science at UT Cluj-Napoca,
Romania, in 2011.
Research Interests
Zsolt’s research interests are in
using specialized hardware to
speed up distributed systems and
databases without increasing their
energy footprint, and to explore
hybrid architectures for emerging
data-intensive workloads. He uses
Field Programmable Gate Arrays
(FPGAs) as a vehicle for prototyping
ideas.
Niki Vazou obtained her Ph.D.
in Computer Science from University
of California, San Diego
in 2016 and held a postdoctoral
fellow position at University of
Maryland, College Park. In 2018
Niki joined IMDEA as a Research
Assistant Professor. Niki received
an MSR graduate research fellowship
in 2014 and is a member of
the Haskell.org committee since
2016. She has published in many
programming languages conferences
(e.g., POPL, ICFP, and OOP-
SLA) and received the Best Paper
Award at OOPSLA 2018. Niki was
an invited speaker at research and
industrial conferences including
Zurihac and Haskell eXchange.
Research Interests
Niki’s interests include refinement
types, automated program verification,
and type systems, and her
goal is to make theorem proving
a useful part of mainstream programming.
She developed Liquid
Haskell, an SMT-based, refinement
type checker for Haskell
programs that has been used for
various applications ranging from
fully automatic light verification of
Haskell code (e.g., bound checking)
to sophisticated theorem proving
(e.g., non-interference).