Final VOSS2 Meeting in Leiden

The VOSS2 project is a long-running bilateral research project sponsored by the German DFG and the Dutch NWO. VOSS stands for Validation of Stochastic Systems and is about the description, analysis and validation of stochastic and probabilistic models. The project was kicked off in the late summer of 2001. Since then, two times per year, researchers in the field of stochastic systems meet, alternating in Germany and the Netherlands. Highlight was the Dagstuhl Seminar "Validation of Stochastic Systems" in December 2002, which had a large attendance and led to a publication in Springer-Verlag's LNCS series.

The regular schedule is complemented by an exchange of visits of the researches in the participating groups. Several PhD students have already been "raised" in the VOSS project and have brought their project to a successful conclusion.

The participating universities include the RWTH Aachen University (first represented by Prof. B. Haverkort, now by Prof. Joost-Pieter Katoen) (D), the University of Twente (NL), the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (in the first period) (D), the University of Bonn (D), the University of Nijmegen (NL), the Saarland University in Saarbrücken (D), the University of the Federal Armed Forces Munich (D), and the Technical University of Dresden (D).

The VOSS project was renewed in 2005 (thus VOSS2) and is now coming to a close. The final VOSS event will be held in the Lorentz Center Leiden (NL) from 12 Nov 2007 through 16 Nov 2007.

Scientific coordinators of VOSS2:

Holger Hermanns (Saarland University, Germany),
Christel Baier (University of Dresden, Germany),
Boudewijn Haverkort (University of Twente, The Netherlands),
Joost-Pieter Katoen (RWTH Aachen University, Germany),
Markus Siegle (University of the Federal Armed Forces, Germany),
Frits Vaandrager (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands)

BSc/MSc/Diploma Topics
Teaching WS 2012/13
Hybrid Systems Group

We are looking for a HiWi for the Compiler Construction course. If you are interested, please contact Thomas Noll.

Joost-Pieter Katoen has been appointed as a member of the renowned Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe), a European, non-governmental association acting as an Academy whose members are scientists and scholars who collectively aim to promote learning, education and research.

Vacancies for postdoctoral researchers in "Automated Analysis of Probabilistic Programs". Application deadline: August 15, 2013.

Joost-Pieter Katoen has been awarded a Distinguished Professorship from the RWTH Aachen University.

The Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC'13) conference in Philadelphia has been very successful: Hongfei Fu received the best student paper award for his paper "Approximating acceptance probabilities of CTMC-paths on multi-clock deterministic timed automata". Besides, the paper by Ilya Tkachev, Alexandru Mereacre, Alessandro Abate and Joost-Pieter Katoen was ranked second in the overall best paper award selection.

Joost-Pieter Katoen has been elected as Steering Committee Chair of ETAPS (www.etaps.org), the largest conference on theory and practice of software in Europe. He is the first non-UK ETAPS SC chair since the conference was initiated in 1998. More information here.

The Alumni-Magazine of RWTH Aachen University contains an interview with our former PhD student and postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Tingting Han.

HiWi's wanted to work in a new European Space Agency project for enhancing state-of-the-art design and analysis tools (COMPASS) for the next generation European rockets. Need programming and model checking affinity. See here for details and contact.

We offer openings for several PhD candidates in the area of
"Model-Based Design and Analysis for Dependable Software Systems". Deadline for application: September 14, 2012. For further information click here.

The Theory of Hybrid Systems Group offers two jobs as student assistants within the CEBug project. For more information, look here.

Dino Distefano received the prestigious Roger Needham Award for his work on software verification. This award is for a distinguished research contribution in computer science by a UK based researcher who has completed up to 10 years of post-doctoral research. Dr. Distefano was the first PhD student supervised by Joost-Pieter Katoen.

Marijn Jongerden received the German MMB (Messung, Modellierung und Bewertung von Rechensystemen) Award 2012 of the GI/ITG-Committee for Measurement, Modelling and Evaluation of Computing Systems for his PhD-thesis on "Model-based energy analysis of battery powered systems". His work was supervised by Boudewijn Haverkort (Twente) and Joost-Pieter Katoen.

Our paper "Formal Correctness, Safety, Dependability and Performance Analysis of a Satellite" has been accepted to ICSE 2012 in the track SE in Practice (18% acceptance rate). The paper treats a new satellite from the European Space Agency that was modeled and analyzed with modern tools during the actual satellite design.

Joost-Pieter Katoen will act as DJ in the "Nacht der Professoren" in the Apollo bar and cinema.