Design and Analysis of Concurrent and Embedded Systems

Tom Henzinger

Tom Henzinger's group is interested in mathematical methods for improving the quality of software. More and more aspects of our everyday lives are controlled by software and over 90% of the computing power is in places you wouldn’t expect, such as cell phones, kitchen appliances, and pacemakers. Computer software has, at the same time, become one of the most complicated artifacts produced by man. It is therefore unavoidable that software contains bugs, and dealing with these bugs is a major technical challenge.

The group focuses on concurrent software and on embedded software. A concurrent system consists of many parallel processes that interact with one another, whether in a global network or on a single chip. Hardware manufacturers pack an ever increasing number of microprocessors on one chip, generating massive parallelism inside each computer. These systems are difficult to program, creating one of the biggest challenges of computer science today. Concurrent software is extremely error-prone because of the very large number of different interactions that are possible between parallel processes. They cannot be exhausted by testing the system, and concurrency bugs sometimes show up after many years of flawless operation of the system.

An embedded system is a software system that interacts with the physical world, such as the electronic components in a car or aircraft. For such embedded systems, the main technical challenge is to get the software to react in real time. For a flight control system it is not only critical that the software computes the right results, but also that it does so sufficiently fast.

Our tools for building more reliable software are mathematical logic, automata theory, and models of computation. Some of these models can be used also to mimic certain biological systems, making the field inherently interdisciplinary. Computational models of, say, a living cell are different from mathematical equations as they can be executed on a computer and used to study the causal relationships between different events in the cell. This new field of research has been dubbed "Executable Biology."

Contact
Thomas Henzinger
Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria)
Am Campus 1
A – 3400 Klosterneuburg

Phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-1033
E-mail: thomas.henzinger@remove-this.ist.ac.at

Thomas Henzinger's website (with CV & publication list)

Henzinger Group website

Assistant
Elisabeth Hacker

Phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-1015
E-mail: elisabeth.hacker@remove-this.ist.ac.at

Team

  • Udi Boker, Postdoc
  • Sameep Bagadia, Student Intern
  • Pavol Cerny, Postdoc
  • Cezara Dragoi, Postdoc
  • Ashutosh Gupta, Postdoc
  • Jan Otop, Postdoc
  • Arjun Radhakrishna, PhD Student
  • Ali Sezgin, Postdoc
  • Damien Zufferey, PhD Student

Current Projects

  • Quantitative modeling and analysis of reactive systems
  • Interfaces and contracts for component-based hardware and software design
  • Predictability and robustness for real-time and embedded systems 
  • Modern concurrency paradigms such as software transactional memory and cloud computing
  • Model checking biochemical reaction networks

Selected Publications

    • Chatterjee K, de Alfaro L, Henzinger TA. 2011. Qualitative concurrent parity games. ACM Transactions on Computational Logic 12: 1-51.
    • Henzinger TA, Singh V, Wies T, Zufferey D. 2011. Scheduling large jobs by abstraction refinement. Proceedings of EuroSys, ACM Press 329-342.
    • Fisher J, Harel D, Henzinger TA. 2011. Biology as reactivity. Communications of the ACM 54: 72-82.

    Career
    2009     Professor and President, IST Austria
    2005–     Adjunct Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA
    2004–2009     Professor, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
    1999–2000     Director, Max-Planck Institute, Saarbrücken, Germany
    1998–2005     Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA
    1997–1998     Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA
    1996–1997     Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA
    1992–1995     Assistant Professor, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA
    1991     Postdoc, University of Grenoble, France
    1991     PhD, Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA

    Selected Distinctions
    ISI Highly Cited Researcher

    2012     Wittgenstein Award, Austrian Science Fund FWF
    2011     Member, Austrian Academy of Sciences
    2011     ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award
    2010     ERC Advanced Investigator Grant
    2009     Corresponding Member, Austrian Academy of Sciences
    2006     ACM Fellow
    2006     IEEE Fellow
    2006     Member, Academia Europaea
    2005     Member, German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
    1995     ONR Young Investigator Award
    1995     NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award

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