Phd and internship subjects

PhD subjects

• Formal Modeling and Verification of Parameterized and Distributed Systems

Applications of distributed systems are omnipresent, allowing to share resources and coordinate activities between geographically distributed parties. Designing, understanding, and validating distributed systems is challenging because of the huge number of interactions between components, some potentially leading to unpredictable scenarios. Mechanizing the analysis and verification of distributed systems is notoriusly difficult. Recently, there has been a notable trend to apply interactive theorem provers, i.e., using proof assistants, to the task. We propose to develop a complementary set of verification methods based, on generalizations of the more mechanized methods from the model-checking and automated theorem proving communities

Internship subjects

• A Solver for Monadic Second Order Logic of Graphs of Bounded Tree-width

The goal of this internship is to first try the direct implementation that follows Courcelle's proof, identity its bottlenecks and, second, devises solutions by generating more compact MSO formulae over trees, that postpone (or even avoid) state explosion, in some cases.

• Verifying Concurrent Systems with Automata over Infinite Alphabets

The goal of this internship is to study extensions of finite-state automata over infinite alphabets and apply them to the verification of concurrent and distributed systems with unbounded numbers of threads. The internship comprises theoretical as well as implementation work, and will explore orthogonal domains, such as logic, automata theory and concurrency.