Prof. Jakob Rehof honored with international computer science award
- Forschung
The International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV) honored Prof. Jakob Rehof from the Faculty of Computer Science with the "CAV Award 2023" in Paris this summer. The international award is given annually for fundamental contributions in the field of computer-aided verification. The professor of software engineering from the Faculty of Computer Science was honored for introducing context-constrained analysis and applying it to the systematic testing of concurrent programs. He shares this year's award with colleagues from Microsoft and Meta, as well as the University of Wisconsin.
Concurrent programs involve processes that execute concurrently and may influence each other in the process. The analysis of such programs is therefore particularly complex, and fundamental questions are therefore not computable. Among the fundamental questions is, for example, the reachability question: Can a concurrent system get into an error situation? Prof. Jakob Rehof already showed in 2005 together with his colleague Shaz Qadeer that a restriction of the execution contexts leads to computability. Accordingly, a large part of practically relevant reachability questions can theoretically be answered automatically. Further work, building on Rehof and Qadeer's fundamental findings, has since further applied context-constrained analysis to the systematic testing of concurrent programs.
"The award-winning work has had a significant impact on academia and industry, leading to numerous theoretical, methodological and practical developments and efficient tools used in software development," states the CAV jury's citation for this year's award to Prof. Rehof and his colleagues Akash Lal and Madan Musuvathi of Microsoft Research, Shaz Qadeer of Meta, and Thomas Reps of the University of Wisconsin. The award comes with a cash prize of $10,000.
About Prof. Jakob Rehof
Jakob Rehof has been a professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Technical University of Dortmund since 2006, where he holds the Chair of Software Engineering. From 2006 to 2021, he was also a member of the institute management of the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering (ISST) in Dortmund. From 1998 to 2006, Jakob Rehof worked at Microsoft Research in the USA. He studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Copenhagen and holds a PhD in computer science from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen.