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News

  • The paper Compositional Value Iteration with Pareto Caching of MDPs by Kazuki Watanabe (NII Tokyo, visited SWS), Marck van der Vegt, Sebastian Junges and Ichiro Hasuo has been accepted at CAV 2024.
  • The paper Shaken, Not Stirred. How Developers Like Their Amplified Test co-authored by Mairieli Wessel in collaboration with Carolin Brandt, Ali Khatami, and Andy Zaidman from TU Delft, has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE).
  • Mathijs Schuts has left Philips and will begin his position as Research Fellow within the Embedded Systems Innovation (ESI) department at TNO starting from March 1st.
  • The paper Parameter synthesis for Markov models: covering the parameter space, co-authored by Sebastian Junges, Erika Ábrahám (RWTH Aachen University), Christian Hensel (RWTH Aachen University), Nils Jansen, Joost-Pieter Katoen (RWTH), Tim Quatmann (RWTH) and Matthias Volk (TU Eindhoven) and mostly written in 2018, has now appeared in FMSD.
  • The paper Model based component development and analysis with ComMA co-authored by Mathijs Schuts has been published in a Special issue on Success Stories in Model-Driven Engineering of the Science of Computer Programming journal.
  • Daniel Strüber is program co-chair of the 28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference (SPLC 2024), in Luxembourg, September 2-6, 2024.
  • The paper Machine Learning Experiment Management Tools: A Mixed-Methods Empirical Study, co-authored by Daniel Strüber, has been accepted for publication in the EMSE journal.
  • Read this article in Bits and Chips on the recent Mascot Program Day, co-organized by members of our group.
  • Pieter Koopman and Mart Lubbers will will give a tutorial at the Lambda-days entitled The design and implementation of embedded Domain Specific Languages.
  • The paper Running a Red Light: An Investigation into Why Software Engineers (Occasionally) Ignore Coverage Checks, co-authored by Mairieli Wessel in collaboration with Alexander Sterk (TU Delft), Andy Zaidman (TU Delft), and Eli Hooten (Sentry.io), has been accepted at the International Conference on Automation of Software Test (AST 2024).
  • The paper A Supervised Learning Approach to Robust Reinforcement Learning for Job Shop Scheduling by SWS researchers Christoph Schmidl, Nils Jansen, and former SWS member Thiago D. Simão has been accepted at ICAART 2024.
  • The NWO open competition grant proposal FuRoRe: Fundamentals of Runtime Monitoring by Sebastian Junges has been accepted. In this project, we will investigate a combination of probabilistic model checking and active learning to obtain runtime monitors that can raise alarms in uncertain environments.

2023

  • Three papers by SWS researchers accepted at TACAS 2024! (1) Small Test Suites for Active Automata Learning by Loes Kruger, Sebastian Junges, and Jurriaan Rot, (2) Pareto Curves for Compositionally Model Checking String Diagrams of MDPs by Kazuki Watanabe (NII Tokyo, visited SWS), Marck van der Vegt, Ichiro Hasuo (NII Tokyo), Jurriaan Rot, and Sebastian Junges (3) CTMCs with Imprecisely Timed Observations by Thom Badings, Matthias Volk (TU Eindhoven), Sebastian Junges, Marielle Stoelinga and Nils Jansen.
  • The I/O magazine published an article about Nils Jansen's research within his ERC Starting grant, titled How can AI better handle uncertainties in the real world?
  • SwS member Bernard van Gastel has been in the news in November and December 2023 with his topic of sustainable digitalisation:
  • Two papers by SWS researchers accepted at AAAI-24! (1) “Factored Online Planning in Many-Agent POMDPs.” Maris Galesloot, Thiago D. Simão, Sebastian Junges, Nils Jansen, and (2) “Robust Active Measuring under Model Uncertainty.” Merlijn Krale, Thiago D. Simão, Jana Tumova, Nils Jansen. Thiago was previously a post-doc at SWS; he is now at TU/e. Jana is a collaborator from KTH Stockholm in Sweden.
  • Sebastian Junges has been granted an NWO Open Science Fund for the project StormAE: The Probabilistic Model Checker Storm for Almost Everyone in which the team of storm developers will improve the model checker Storm towards ease-of-use, in particular also in classroom settings.
  • Three papers by SwS members accepted at Conference on Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP) 2024! A paper by Niels van der Weide (with collaborators from Delft, Utrecht, MPI) about univalent double categories, a paper by Niels van der Weide (with collaborators from Delft, Toulouse) about monoidal categories, and a paper by Ike Mulder and Robbert Krebbers about subformula linking.
  • The article entitled 'Synthesis-Based Engineering of Supervisory Controllers' by Wan Fokkink (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Martijn Goorden (Aalborg University and Rijkswaterstaat), Dennis Hendriks (SwS and TNO-ESI), Asia van de Mortel-Fronczak (TU/e), Wytse Oortwijn (TNO-ESI) and Koos Rooda (TU/e) has been accepted for publication in the Mikroniek magazine.
  • Mairieli Wessel organized the 22nd Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop (BENEVOL 2023), in Nijmegen, November 27-28, 2023.
  • Six members of our group (as well as some former members and guests) participated in the productive Dagstuhl meeting Coalgebra Meets Automata Learning.
  • Eline Bovy won the best master thesis award at the BNAIC/BeNeLearn workshop in Delft
  • A paper accepted at POPL 2024 about verifying dead lock freedom using separation logic, authored by Jules Jacobs and Robbert Krebbers, in collaboration with Jonas Kastberg Hinrichsen (Aarhus). This is the 8th year in a row that Robbert has at least one paper at POPL!
  • On November 1st, Hilde Wolvers - van Raaij joined our group as management assistent. Welcome Hilde!
  • Congratulations for Nils Jansen, who has started as full professor at Ruhr University Bochum, where he will lead the chair on Safety and Reliability of Artificial Intelligence. Nils will keep a part-time position within the SWS group. We look forward to continue our fruitful collaboration!
  • Nils Jansen was elected into the steering committee of the International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems (QEST).
  • Ike Mulder and Robbert Krebbers received a Distinguished Artifact Award for their OOPSLA 2023 paper about proof automation for linearizability in separation logic.
  • Frits Vaandrager is chair of the jury for the Test-of-Time Award that will be awarded at the upcoming International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR'24).
  • Dennis Hendriks (SwS / TNO-ESI) organized and hosted on September 26 the 2nd Eclipse ESCET / Synthesis-Based Engineering (SBE) community meeting. It was a vibrant meeting, with 35 participants. The participants were impressed with the progress made since the previous community meeting, and accepted Dennis' proposal to further mature and grow the ecosystem. If you want to know more, check out the minutes of the meeting, which include links to the slides.
  • The paper CIGAR: Contrastive Learning for GitHub Action Recommendation by Jiangnan Huang and Bin Lin has been accepted at 23rd IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2023). The paper also received the Best Paper Award.
  • Nils Jansen (iCIS), Thom Badings (iCIS), Sascha Caron (IMAPP), Thiago D. Simão (formerly iCIS, now TU/e), and Gijs Slijpen (Alfa Laval) received a voucher from the Interdisciplinary Research Platform (IRP) at the Radboud University for their project ORLEANS: Offline Reinforcement Learning for Sustainable Transportation at Sea.
  • On October 4, 2023, Mart Lubbers successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled Orchestrating the Internet of Things with Task-Oriented Programming in the aula of Radboud University.
  • The paper Automata with Timers by Véronique Bruyère, Guillermo Pérez, Gaëtan Staquet, and Frits Vaandrager received the Oded Maler Award in Timed Systems for best paper at FORMATS 2023.
  • Petra van den Bos and Marielle Stoelinga received the best artefact evaluation award at FORTE'23 for their paper With a little help from your friends: semi-cooperative games via Joker moves.
  • The paper Towards an Industrial Stateful Software Rejuvenation Toolchain using Model Learning by Mathijs Schuts has been accepted at SPLASH 2023.
  • Jointly with Patrick van Buerden, Sven-Bodo Scholz received the Peter Landin Prize at IFL 2023 for the best paper at IFL 2022.
  • The paper Rank-Polymorphism for Shape-Guided Blocking co-authored by Artjoms Sinkarovs, Thomas Koopman, and Sven-Bodo Scholz was accepted at FHPNC 2023.
  • Sven-Bodo Scholz presented Immutable Arrays Help Mutating Arrays More Efficiently at ML 2023.
  • Daniel Strüber received a distinguished reviewer award at SPLC 2023.
  • The paper Automated Extraction of Grammar Optimization Rule Configurations for Metamodel-Grammar Co-evolution co-authored by Daniel Strüber in collaboration with researchers from Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, University of Rostock and Xitaso IT and Software Solutions has been accepted at SLE 2023.
  • Two submissions have been accepted at 39th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2023): (1) Investigating the Impact of Vocabulary Difficulty and Code Naturalness on Program Comprehension (Registered Report) by Bin Lin in collaboration with G. Robles from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, and (2) An Empirical Study on the Use of Snapshot Testing (New Ideas and Emerging Results Track) by Bin Lin in collaboration with researchers from Nara Institute of Science and Technology.
  • The paper The Human Side of Fuzzing: Challenges Faced by Developers During Fuzzing Activities co-authored by Bin Lin in collaboration with researchers from Kyushu University, Nara Institute of Science and Technology and Università della Svizzera italiana has been accepted to ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM).
  • Sebastian Junges received a VENI grant on Symbolic Probabilistic Model Checking with Massive Design Spaces.
  • ND published an interview with Frits Vaandrager on the dangers of AI.
  • The paper CIRef: A Tool for Visualizing the Historical Data of Refactorings in Java Projects, co-authored by Mairieli Wessel in collaboration with researchers from Federal University of Ceará, Brazil, has been accepted at the Tools track of the SBES 2023
  • The paper Reinforcement Learning by Guided Safe Exploration by Qisong Yang, Thiago D. Simão, Nils Jansen, Simon H. Tindemans, and Matthijs T. J. Spaan has been accepted at ECAI 2023.
  • The paper GitHub Actions: The Impact on the Pull Request Process, by Mairieli Wessel in collaboration with Marco Gerosa (Northern Arizona University, USA) and Christoph Treude (University of Melbourne, Australia), has been accepted at the Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) Journal.
  • Jurriaan Rot received a VIDI grant on Approximation, Abstraction and Apartness in Automata Learning.
  • Nils Jansen was selected as an area chair for Learning and Adaptation at AAMAS, the leading conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems.
  • Three papers accepted for MODELS 2023: 1. 'gLTSdiff: A Generalized Framework for Structural Comparison of Software Behavior', by Dennis Hendriks (SwS, TNO-ESI) and Wytse Oortwijn (TNO-ESI). 2. 'An Experimental Evaluation of Conformance Testing Techniques in Active Automata Learning' by Bharat Garhewal (SwS) and Diego Damasceno (formerly SwS, now ASML). 3. 'Manual Abstraction in the Wild: A Multiple-Case Study on OSS Systems’ Class Diagrams and Implementations' co-authored by Daniel Strüber in collaboration Wenli Zhang, Weixing Zhang and Regina Hebig.
  • Dennis Hendriks is organizing the second Eclipse ESCET community meeting. The theme of the meeting is the Eclipse ESCET and Synthesis-Based Engineering (SBE) ecosystem. There will be presentations from various members of the community, that show both increasing maturity of the technology and interesting new directions that are being explored. A significant part of the meeting is dedicated to discussing ways to further grow the ecosystem and to expand collaboration. If you join physically, there is also a free lunch afterwards with networking opportunities. If you want to know more, check out the invitation. If you want to join, please register as described in the invitation (it is free). Please also feel free to share the invitation with your network.
  • The paper A Preliminary Study of GitHub Actions Workflow Changes, co-authored by Mairieli Wessel in collaboration with Pooya Rostami Mazrae, Alexandre Decan, and Tom Mens from the University of Mons in Belgium, has been accepted at SATToSE 2023.
  • Many SWS researchers attended the SEN Symposium on June 2 in Amsterdam, Sebastian Junges was one of the organizers, Bin Lin gave an invited talk, and Mariane Medeiros enjoyed meeting other Brazilian SE researchers.
  • Mairieli Wessel co-authored a book chapter titled The GitHub Development Workflow Automation Ecosystems, published in “Software Ecosystems: Tooling and Analytics,” 2023, Springer Nature. The results are joint work with researchers from the University of Mons, Belgium.
  • The paper Finding the Right Way to Rome: Effect-oriented Graph Transformations, co-authored by Daniel Strüber, has been accepted at ICGT 2023.
  • The paper A benchmark generator framework for evolving variant-rich software, co-authored by Daniel Strüber, has been accepted at the Journal of Systems & Software.
  • Bernard van Gastel was interviewed by het Financieel Dagblad (in Dutch) about the likely stall in applying/integrating AI due to the energy consumption and the scarcity of energy. Published 22 May 2023, see Ontwikkeling AI loopt vast op astronomisch stroomverbruik.
  • Nils Jansen became Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT ExPLAIn).
  • The paper Lower Bounds for Active Automata Learning by Loes Kruger, Bharat Garhewal and Frits Vaandrager was accepted at ICGI 2023.
  • The paper Risk-aware Curriculum Generation for Heavy-tailed Task Distributions was accepted at UAI 2023, co-authored by Thiago D. Simão and Nils Jansen (both SWS), in collaboration with Cevahir Koprulu and Ufuk Topcu from The University of Texas at Austin.
  • Two papers accepted at CALCO 2023: Forward and Backward Steps in a Fibration authored by Ruben Turkenburg (SWS), Harsh Beohar (University of Sheffield), Clemens Kupke (Strathclyde University) and Jurriaan Rot (SWS); and Bisimilar States in Uncertain Structures authored by Jurriaan Rot and Thorsten Wißmann (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, former SWS).
  • In March, Nils Jansen gave a keynote talk at FM 2023 in Lübeck, outlining his vision on neurosymbolic artificial intelligence. The talk is now available online.
  • Robbert Krebbers is one of the recipients of the 2023 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation for his work on the separation logic framework Iris. The award is for an outstanding contribution represented by a paper or small group of papers within the past 25 years. See also this press release from the university.
  • On May 1st, Yaomi-Aimée Elstak joined our group as management assistent. Welcome Yaomi!
  • A paper accepted at PLDI 2023 about proof automation for disjunctions (without backtracking) in concurrent separation logic, authored by Ike Mulder and Robbert Krebbers, in collaboration with Łukasz Czajka.
  • A paper accepted at OOPSLA 2023 about proof automation for linearizability in separation logic, authored by Ike Mulder and Robbert Krebbers.
  • Two papers accepted at CAV 2023. 1. Efficient Sensitivity Analysis for Parametric Robust Markov Chains, co-authored by Thom Badings, Sebastian Junges, Nils Jansen (all SWS) in collaboration with Ahmadreza Marandi (TUE) and Ufuk Topcu (UT Austin). 2. Search and Explore: Symbiotic Policy Synthesis in POMDPs by Roman Andriushchenko (Brno University of Technology), Alexander Bork (RWTH Aachen University), Milan Ceska (Brno), Sebastian Junges (SWS), Joost-Pieter Katoen (RWTH) and Filip Macak (Brno).
  • Two papers accepted at IJCAI 2023. 1. More for Less: Safe Policy Improvement with Stronger Performance Guarantees, co-authored by Marnix Suilen, Thiago D. Simão, and Nils Jansen (all SWS) in collaboration with Patrick Wienhöft, Clemens Dubslaff, and Christel Baier (TU Dresden). 2. Recursive Small-Step Multi-Agent A* for Dec-POMDPs, co-authored by SWS student Wietze Koops and Nils Jansen, Sebastian Junges, and Thiago D. Simão (all SWS).
  • The paper Action Codes by Frits Vaandrager and Thorsten Wißmann was accepted at ICALP 2023.
  • Nils Jansen is program co-chair of the 23th International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems (QEST 2023), in Antwerp, September 18-23, 2023.
  • Cynthia Kop is program co-chair of the 10th International Workshop on Rewriting Techniques for Program Transformations and Evaluation, Rome, Italy, July 1st, 2023.
  • Our PhD student Deivid Vale is on the program committee of the 19th International Workshop on Termination, August 24-25, 2023, Obergurgl, Austria.
  • Frits Vaandrager was amongst the first Dutch scientists to sign the petition to Pause Giant AI Experiments. The petition received much attention in the press and Frits was interviewed by NOS and AD, appeared on national TV in Nieuwsuur and the talkshow Beau, and on 3FM radio with Barend & Benner (starting at 1:20:20).
  • The paper A Maintenance Planning Framework using Online and Offline Deep Reinforcement Learning, co-authored by Zaharah Bukhsh (TU/e), Hajo Molegraaf (ROLSCH Asset Management), and Nils Jansen has been accepted for publication in the journal Neural Computing and Applications.
  • The article entitled Getting a Grip on the Ever-Changing Software in Cyber-Physical Systems by Wytse Oortwijn (TNO-ESI), Dennis Hendriks (TNO-ESI and SwS), Arjan van der Meer (TNO-ESI, ASML), Bas Huijbrechts (TNO-ESI) has been published in the INCOSE INSIGHT magazine.
  • The article entitled An interview study about the use of logs in embedded software engineering, by Nan Yang (TU/e), Pieter Cuijpers (TU/e, Aalborg University), Dennis Hendriks (TNO-ESI, SwS), Ramon Schiffelers (ASML, TU/e), Johan Lukkien (TU/e) and Alexander Serebrenik (TU/e) has been published in the Empirical Software Engineering journal.
  • The discussion paper entitled "CIF: Towards an industrial strength synthesis-based supervisory control engineering toolset", by Michel Reniers (TU/e) and Dennis Hendriks (TNO-ESI, SwS), has been accepted for an invited session of the 22nd World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC 2023).
  • Two papers accepted at ICAPS 2023. 1. Act-Then-Measure: Reinforcement Learning for Partially Observable Environments with Active Measuring with SWS Master student Merlijn Krale as first author, supervised by Thiago D. Simão and Nils Jansen. 2. Model Checking for Adversarial Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Reactive Defense Methods, authored by Dennis Groß, Christoph Schmidl, Nils Jansen, and Guillermo Perez (University of Antwerp).
  • Robbert Krebbers was senior conference co-chair for CPP (Certified Programs and Proofs) and senior co-chair for PLMW (Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop). Both events were colocated with POPL'23 and had over 100 participants.
  • Two distinguished paper awards at POPL'23. Jules Jacobs received a distinguished paper award for Higher-Order Leak and Deadlock Free Locks (with Stephanie Balzer; CMU), and Robbert Krebbers for DimSum: A Decentralized Approach to Multi-language Semantics and Verification (with Michael Sammler, Simon Spies, Youngju Song, Emanuele D’Osualdo, Deepak Garg, Derek Dreyer; MPI-SWS).
  • Paper accepted at ICLR 2023! "Safe Reinforcement Learning From Pixels Using a Stochastic Latent Representation", co-authored by Yannick Hogewind, Thiago D. Simão, and Nils Jansen (all SWS) and Tal Kachman (Radboud AI). Special congratulations to Yannick, who worked on this topic as part of his ELLIS fellowship and his Master thesis.
  • Nils Jansen will give a keynote talk at the International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM 2023).
  • Tech Gelderland visited our group and wrote an article about Nils Jansen's research and ERC starting grant. The title is 'Using data to make the world safe', it is available here.
  • Four papers accepted at TACAS 2023: 1. Robust Almost-Sure Reachability in Multi-Environment MDPs by Marck van der Vegt, Nils Jansen, Sebastian Junges (all SWS), 2. A Practitioner's Guide to MDP Model Checking by Arnd Hartmanns (Twente), Sebastian Junges (SWS), Tim Quatmann (RWTH Aachen) and Maximilian Weiniger (TU Munich) 3. Probabilistic Program Verification via Inductive Synthesis of Inductive Invariants by Kevin Batz (RWTH Aachen), Mingshuai Chen (RWTH), Sebastian Junges (SWS), Benjamin Kaminski (Saarland), Joost-Pieter Katoen (RWTH), and Christoph Matheja (DTU), 4. Eclipse ESCET™: The Eclipse Supervisory Control Engineering Toolkit by Wan Fokkink (TU/e and VU), Martijn Goorden (Aalborg University and Rijkswaterstaat), Dennis Hendriks (TNO-ESI and SWS), Bert van Beek (TU/e), Albert Hofkamp (TU/e), Ferdie Reijnen (Vanderlande Industries), Pascal Etman (TU/e), Lars Moormann (TU/e), Asia van de Mortel-Fronczak (TU/e), Michel Reniers (TU/e), Jacobus Rooda (TU/e), Bram van der Sanden (TNO-ESI), Ramon Schiffelers (ASML and TU/e), Sander Thuijsman (TU/e), Jeroen Verbakel (TU/e) and Han Vogel (Rijkswaterstaat).
  • Two papers accepted at FoSSaCS 2023: 1. Preservation and Reflection of Bisimilarity via Invertible Steps by Ruben Turkenburg (SWS), Clemens Kupke (Strathclyde University), Jurriaan Rot (SWS) and Ezra Schoen (Strathclyde University), 2. Weighted and Branching Bisimilarities from Generalized Open Maps by Jérémy Dubut (NII Tokyo) and Thorsten Wißmann (SWS).

2022

  • On Monday December 12th, Ramon Janssen successfully defended his PhD thesis titled Refinement and Partiality for Model-Based Testing in the Aula of the Radboud University.
  • Nils Jansen received an ERC Starting Grant!!!
  • A new book by Henk Barendregt and Giulio Manzonetto A Lambda Calculus Satellite has been recently published. This book presents the state of the art of research in lambda calculus in 2022, including the solutions to most open problems raised Henk Barendregt's The Lambda Calculus, its syntax and semantics (1981/84).
  • Three papers accepted at AAAI 2023. 1. Safe RL via Shielding under Partial Observability (Sebastian Junges and Nils Jansen, with researchers from UT Austin), 2. Probabilities Are Not Enough: Formal Controller Synthesis for Stochastic Dynamical Models with Epistemic Uncertainty (Thom Badings and Nils Jansen, with researchers from the University of Oxford), 3. Safe Policy Improvement for POMDPs via Finite-State Controllers (Thiago D. Simão, Marnix Suilen, and Nils Jansen).
  • Three papers accepted at POPL (like last year), this time co-authored by Robbert Krebbers, Jules Jacobs and Thorsten Wissmann!!!
  • Thom Badings, Nils Jansen, and Marielle Stoelinga will publish an article titled Robust Control for Dynamical Systems with Non-Gaussian Noise via Formal Abstractions in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). The publication will be part of a JAIR special issue dedicated to award winning AI papers and is a thorough extension of the distinguished AAAI paper. The results are joint work with researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Kentucky.
  • Nils Jansen joined Frits Vaandrager as member of the editorial board of the International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT).
  • Thom Badings will present his paper Formal Controller Synthesis for Stochastic Dynamical Models with Epistemic Uncertainty at the workshop Robot Learning Workshop: Trustworthy Autonomy, co-located with NeurIPS 2022. The paper is joint work with Nils Jansen and researchers from the University of Oxford.
  • Congrats to Dr. Mairieli Wessel for being awarded the Best Brazilian Ph.D. Thesis on Software Engineering for 2021 at SBES'22.
  • On Monday October 24th, Jana Wagemaker successfully defended her PhD thesis titled Extensions of (Concurrent) Kleene Algebra in the Aula of the Radboud University.
  • On Monday October 17th, Tim Steenvoorden successfully defended his PhD thesis titled Top Hat: Task Oriented Programming with Style in the Aula of the Radboud University.
  • Congrats to Diego Damasceno for winning the best paper award at SPLC'22!
  • Congrats to Jana Wagemaker for winning a best paper award at CONCUR'22!
  • On September 23rd, a workshop was held on the occasion of the 60th birthday of Frits Vaandrager. A Festschrift was presented and talks were given by Pedro D'Argenio, Kim Larsen, Bart Jacobs, Jan Bergstra, Ed Brinksma, Rob van Glabbeek and Nancy Lynch. See also this news item from our Library of Science.
  • The paper Robust Anytime Learning of Markov Decision Processes has been accepted at NeurIPS 2022, one of the top conferences in AI. The work is a collaboration of SWS researchers Marnix Suilen, Thiago D. Simão, Nils Jansen, and David Parker from the University of Oxford. The following problem is addressed: Learning of Markov decision processes (MDPs) suffers from uncertainty, in particular regarding statistical errors or changes in the environment. The paper provides a novel robust learning scheme that employs Bayesian inference with imprecise priors to learn uncertainty sets of probabilities. The evaluation shows the effectiveness of the approach in comparison to methods from robust reinforcement learning.
  • On September 9, a farewell symposium was organized for Hans Zantema, who will retire as associate professor at TU/e and as professor at Radboud University in the SWS group. There were lectures by several colleagues (including Herman Geuvers from our group) and Hans reflected on his career of more than forty years.
  • On September 1, Bin Lin has joined our group as assistant professor. Welcome, Bin!!
  • Daniel Strüber co-authors two papers accepted for the EMSE journal's special issue on Software Product Lines and Variability-rich Systems: Effects of Variability in Models: A Family of Experiments and Software Variability in Service Robotics.
  • The paper EMMM: A Unified Meta-Model for Tracking Machine Learning Experiments, co-authored by Daniel Strüber, has been accepted at the Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA 2022).
  • On September 16, Daniel Strüber will give a training session on the Henshin model transformation language in MDENetwork, an expert network on model-driven engineering.
  • The paper A Systematic Approach for Interfacing Component-Based Software with an Active Automata Learning Tool, co-authored by Dennis Hendriks has been accepted at the 11th International Symposium On Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation (ISoLA 2022).
  • The paper A Multi-level Methodology for Behavioral Comparison of Software-Intensive Systems, co-authored by Dennis Hendriks has been accepted at the 27th International Conference on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS 2022).
  • Nils Jansen gave an invited talk at the 1st Workshop on Safe Reinforcement Learning, co-located with IJCAI 2022. The talk was titled Safe RL: A Collection of Flavors and discussed the various approaches to safe reinforcement learning in the literature, and showed recent research highlights from the SWS group.
  • Steven Carr, co-supervised by Nils Jansen, succesfully defended his PhD thesis titled Task-Aware Planning and Learning in Partially Observable Environments at the University of Texas at Austin.
  • With sadness, we received the news that emeritus prof.dr.ir. J.B.H. (Hans) Peek passed away on July 21st. Hans was professor by special appointment in Signal Processing and Telecommunication within in our group from 1988 until 1999. As group leader at Philips NatLab, Hans was the first to realize in 1974 (together with L. Vries) that there was an important reason to prefer a digital registration of audio signals above an analog one: an error correcting code could be used that would correct random errors and burst errors to a certain extent. Hans was part of the team which, based on this insight, developed the CD player. At Radboud University, Hans was responsible for a course on Signal Processing and Communication Systems, in which he covered the basics of information theory, error detecting and correcting codes, discrete and fast Fourier transforms, and analog-digital conversion of signals, as well as the application of these fundamental ideas in the Compact Disc System. At Philips Research, he supervised many Computer Science students from our university during internships on e.g. linear time invariant digital filters. Hans was a great colleague: a very kind person, always passionate about research, with many good recommendations for our Computer Science program based on his extensive industrial experience at Philips NatLab.
  • On July 1st, Dr. Mairieli Wessel has joined our group as assistant professor. Welcome, Mairieli!
  • Three papers based on student theses accepted: Model-Driven Optimization: Generating Smart Mutation Operators for Multi-Objective Problems based on Niels van Harten's B.Sc. thesis at SEAA (preprint), A Lightweight Approach for Model Checking Variability-Based Graph Transformations based on Mitchell Albers's research internship at GCM (preprint), and A Tool for Analysing Higher-Order Feature Interactions in Preprocessor Annotations in C and C++ Projects based on David Korsman's research internship at SPLC (tools and demonstrations track; preprint). All co-authored with Diego Damasceno and Daniel Strüber.
  • Diego Damasceno co-authored the paper "Adaptive Behavioral Model Learning for Software Product Lines", accepted at the SPLC'22 - Research Track (preprint).
  • The MoDELS'21 paper authored by Diego Damasceno and Daniel Strüber has been featured at MOdelling LAnguages, the most popular vendor-independent blog on modeling and model-driven engineering.
  • The 2022 edition of the Term Rewriting Seminar (TeReSe) was held in Nijmegen on June 8 in honor of Hans Zantema, who will retire in September.
  • The paper Completeness Theorems for Kleene Algebra with Top, co-authored by Jana Wagemaker has been accepted at the 33rd International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR'22) in Warsaw.
  • The paper The Element of Surprise in Timed Games by Luca de Alfaro, Marco Faella, Thomas A. Henzinger, Rupak Majumdar and Mariëlle Stoelinga has been selected for the test-of-time-award at CONCUR. The purpose of the award is to recognize important achievements in Concurrency Theory that were published at the CONCUR conference and have stood the test of time. The paper was one of the two selected papers from the period 2000-2003. The paper studies concurrent two-person games played in real time, in which the players decide both which action to play, and when to play it. At CONCUR 2022 in Warsaw, the award will be handed out, and a talk on the paper will be presented.

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  • Paper and tutorial at Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2022): The paper Inductive Synthesis of Finite-State Controllers for POMDPs by Roman Andriushchenko, Milan Ceska (both TU Brno), Sebastian Junges (Radboud/SWS) and Joost-Pieter Katoen (RWTH Aachen) adopts a successful inductive synthesis framework such that it solves planning tasks by finding policies in POMDPs. Additionally, Sebastian will co-present a tutorial on Verification Techniques for Probabilistic Systems and Programs, with a particular focus on using the probabilistic model checker Storm for AI problems.
  • The 2022 ROCKS workshop took place from 18-20 May, 2022 in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, hosted by the SWS group, with 52 participants.
  • The paper entitled “Scenario-Based Verification of Uncertain Parametric MDPs” by Thom Badings, Nils Jansen, and Sebastian Junges (all Radboud/SWS), Murat Cubuktepe and Ufuk Topcu (UT Austin, USA) and Joost-Pieter Katoen (RWTH Aachen) has been accepted in the International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT, special issue devoted to TACAS 2020). The paper uses the sampling-based scenario approach to obtain high-confidence guarantees for uncertain MDPs.
  • The second edition of the Iris Workshop took place at Radboud University Nijmegen, 2-6 May 2022, with 57 participants.
  • Two papers accepted at CAV 2022: The paper Sampling-Based Verification of CTMCs with Uncertain Rates by Thom Badings, Nils Jansen, Sebastian Junges, Marielle Stoelinga (all Radboud/SWS) and Matthias Volk (Twente) contributes a method for statistically correct verification of continuous-time Markov chains with unknown transition rates. The paper Abstraction-Refinement for Hierarchical Probabilistic Models by Sebastian Junges (Radboud/SWS) and Matthijs Spaan (TU Delft) introduces a novel approach towards model checking hierarchical Markov decision processes.
  • The paper Constructive Model Inference: Model Learning for Component-Based Software Architectures, co-authored by Dennis Hendriks has been accepted at the 17th International Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2022).
  • On April 21, Dennis Hendriks presented the CIF toolset in the Virtual Talk Series, this time organized by Kai Cai of Osaka City University and Michel Reniers of Eindhoven University of Technology, focused on Discrete Event Systems (DES) tools. With over 50 people in attendance, six tools and libraries were shortly presented (Supremica, UltaDES, DESLab, TCT, MDESops and CIF), followed by a lively panel discussion, on research challenges, industrial adoption, and potential collaborations.
  • The paper We're Not Gonna Break It! Consistency-Preserving Operators for Efficient Product Line Configuration, coauthored by Daniel Strüber, has been accepted for publication in IEEE TSE.
  • We are proud that our colleague Marielle Stoelinga made her debut on the half-marathon, albeit unintended.
  • The Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence published an article about the recent Distinguished AAAI paper, co-authored by Thom Badings, Nils Jansen, and Marielle Stoelinga, on their blog AIhub. The article is available here.
  • Dennis Hendriks, as project lead of the Eclipse ESCET open source project, organized and hosted on March 30 the project's first community meeting, on Synthesis-Based Engineering (SBE) of supervisory controllers. About 30 people participated in the hybrid meeting, where SBE and ESCET were discussed, as well as the plans of Rijkswaterstaat in this direction.
  • The paper Large-scale semi-automated migration of legacy C/C++ test code, by Mathijs Schuts, has been published in journal Software: Practice and Experience.
  • Daniel Strüber coauthors the paper Checking security compliance between models and code published in SoSyM.
  • The paper A Benchmark for Active Learning of Variability-Intensive Systems, coauthored by Diego Damasceno, has been accepted in the Challenge Cases Track of the SPLC'22. The paper invites participants to develop solutions for benchmarking model learning techniques in the context of software product lines. Tool prototypes for synthesizing artificial benchmark models and handcrafted state machine models of SPLs are both welcome!
  • The NWO open competition grant proposal The Power of Equality by Herman Geuvers (SWS) and Benno van de Berg (UvA) has been accepted. Niels van der Weide will work on this project as a postdoc together with a PhD student at the UvA. Congratulations Herman and Niels!!
  • The paper Sampling-Based Robust Control of Autonomous Systems with Non-Gaussian Noise, coauthored by SWS researchers Thom Badings, Nils Jansen and Marielle Stoelinga, was selected for a distinguished paper award at AAAI 2022. The conference received 9251 submissions, of which 1349 were accepted for publication. According to research.com, AAAI is one of the top 5 Computer Science Conferences. The paper constitutes the first approach to provide hard safety guarantees on the behavior of autonomous systems in continuous-space environments under stochastic uncertainty stemming from unknown distributions. See also this news item of our faculty.
  • The paper Grouping of Maintenance Actions with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Graph Convolutional Networks, co-authored by David Kerkkamp, Zaharah Bukhsh, and Nils Jansen, won the best student paper award at ICAART 2022. Congratulations David!
  • The paper Querying Images with Scenario Programs for Sim-to-Real Validation co-authored by Sebastian Junges has been accepted at the International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS).
  • The paper Simuliris: A Separation Logic Framework for Verifying Concurrent Program Optimizations coauthored by Robbert Krebbers is the recipient of a distinguished paper award at POPL 2022.
  • Cynthia Kop chairs the programme committee of the 18th International Workshop on Termination (WST 2022), August 11-12, 2022, Haifa, Israel.
  • The paper A New Approach for Active Automata Learning Based on Apartness by Frits Vaandrager, Bharat Garhewal, Jurriaan Rot and Thorsten Wissmann has been accepted for presentation at TACAS'22.
  • The paper Concurrent NetKAT coauthored by Jana Wagemaker and Jurriaan Rot has been accepted for presentation at ESOP '22.

2021

  • The paper Task-Aware Verifiable RNN-Based Policies for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes, co-authored by Nils Jansen, has been published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). The work extends previous papers on combining the training of recurrent neural networks as policy representation for POMDPs with the rigor of formal verification.
  • Daniel Strüber coauthors the paper A Fine-grained Data Set and Analysis of Tangling in Bug Fixing Commits, which has been accepted in EMSE. The paper results from a large-scale effort for creating a curated dataset of bug-fixing commits, involving 48 researchers.
  • The paper Damage detection using in-domain and cross-domain transfer learning, co-authored by former SWS member Zaharah Bukhsh and Nils Jansen, has been published in the journal Neural Computing and Applications. The work investigates transfer learning techniques for predictive maintanances of bridge structures.
  • Europe Needs Strong Software Research!
  • The paper Convex Optimization for Parameter Synthesis in MDPs, co-authored by Nils Jansen and Sebastian Junges, has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. The paper subsumes and extends a succesful line of work that employs convex optimization techniques for the efficient parameter synthesis in Markov decision processes.
  • From October 20-22 the SWS group had a productive research retreat at Schloss Dagstuhl.
  • De Raad voor Accreditatie (RvA) heeft Mariëlle Stoelinga benoemd tot lid van de Commissie Accreditaties (C.A.). RvA is de nationale accreditatie-instantie en heeft als primaire taak het accrediteren en geaccrediteerd houden van conformiteitbeoordelende organisaties: laboratoria, inspectie-instellingen, certificatie-instellingen en verificatie-instellingen.
  • On October 14th, Robbert Krebbers's PhD student Arjen Rouvoet defended his PhD thesis with cum laude distinction (at TU Delft).
  • Sebastian Junges coauthors the paper Gradient-Descent for Randomized Controllers under Partial Observability which has been accepted at VMCAI'22.
  • Frits Vaandrager presented a tutorial lecture at the 13th Working Conference on Verified Software: Theories, Tools and Experiments (VSTTE 2021), October 19, 2021.
  • Sebastian Junges will co-present a tutorial on Formal Analysis of AI-Based Autonomy: From Modeling to Runtime Assurance at the Runtime Verification conference on October 14.
  • Dennis Hendriks presented his work on preventing regressions for software changes at the Bits & Chips Event on October 14.
  • Robbert Krebbers is coauthor on three papers that have been accepted at POPL22!!! Jules Jacobs is first author on one of these three.
  • Nils Jansen coauthors the paper Formalizing and Guaranteeing* Human-Robot Interaction that has been published at Communications of the ACM. The paper provides an overview to challenges in Human-Robot-Interaction regarding trust and safety, and how formal methods can help. This collaborative paper is a result of the very fruitful Dagstuhl Meeting Verification and Synthesis of Human-Robot Interaction.
  • Daniel Strüber coauthors the paper Sustaining and Improving Graduated Graph Consistency: A Static Analysis of Graph Transformations that has been accepted for publication in SCP.
  • Mathijs Schuts and Jozef Hooman will present a paper on Industrial Experiences With the Evolution of a DSL at the DSM’21 (Domain-Specific Modeling) workshop at the SPLASH'21 conference.
  • On October 11, Jozef Hooman will present a tutorial on the CommaSuite at the MODELS'21 conference.
  • Diego Damasceno and Daniel Strüber author the paper Quality Guidelines for Research Artifacts in Model-Driven Engineering that has been accepted for presentation at MODELS'21.
  • Natuurlijk wil een wetenschapper soms ook winnen, NRC, 29 juli 2021
  • Jurriaan Rot received a grant within NWO Open Competition call for the research proposal Modular Construction and Analysis of Distributive Laws for Programming Language Semantics.
  • Thorsten Wißmann coauthors the paper Explaining Behavioural Inequivalence Generically in Quasilinear Time that has been accepted for presentation at CONCUR'21, where it is a candidate for the best paper award.

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2020

  • Een halfuurtje Google-storing legt bloot hoe afhankelijk we zijn van één bedrijf, according to Marielle Stoelinga in de Dutch national newspaper the Volkskrant.
  • Robbert Krebbers has been awarded a 100.000 USD grant from Google, on top of the 40.000 USD grant he received previous month. He will work together with Google (Android Security and Privacy Research), MPI-SWS, Cambridge University, Seoul National University and Aarhus University on formal verification of the safety and security of the PKVM hypervisor. PKVM will be used in future versions of Android to isolate applications from each other.
  • On December 8, at 15.30, Niels van der Weide has successfully defended his PhD thesis Constructing Higher Inductive Types.
  • We would like to announce Tactician 1.0 beta1, the first official release of Tactician, a tactic learner and prover for the Coq Proof Assistant. See the website and an online demo for more information.
  • Marnix Suilen and Nils Jansen coauthor the paper Robust Finite-State Controllers for Uncertain POMDPs that has been accepted for publication at AAAI 2021.
  • Cynthia Kop received a Vidi grant!!
  • Marielle Stoelinga and Nils Jansen coauthor the article PrimaVera: Synergising Predictive Maintenance that describes the concerted approach on predictive maintenance within the PrimaVera project. The article has been accepted for publication in Applied Sciences.
  • Frits Vaandrager coauthors the paper Learning Mealy Machines with One Timer that was accepted for LATA 2020-2021.
  • Nils Jansen coauthors the paper Formalizing and Guaranteeing* Human-Robot Interaction which has been accepted for publication at Communications of the ACM.
  • Robbert Krebbers has been awarded a 40.000 USD grant from Google. He will work together with Google (Android Security and Privacy Research), MPI-SWS, Cambridge University, and Seoul National University on the verification of the PKVM hypervisor.
  • The paper Paradoxes of Probabilistic Programming by Jules Jacobs has been accepted for POPL 2021.
  • Nils Jansen became a member of ELLIS (European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems) and Radboud's ELLIS unit.
  • Nils Jansen coauthors the paper Control Theory Meets POMDPs: A Hybrid Systems Approach which has been accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
  • Daniel Strüber received a best reviewer award at SPLC 2020.
  • On October 8, at 13.30, Petra van den Bos successfully defended her PhD thesis Coverage and Games in Model-Based Testing.
  • On October 8, at 12.30, former SWS colleague Ilona Wilmont successfully defended her PhD thesis Eén klein detail kan een groot geheel ontwrichten… maar zie jij ook hoe?.
  • On October 1, Liye Guo and Christoph Schmidl joined our group as PhD students. Welcome!
  • Dennis Gross and Nils Jansen work together with TNO on applying adversarial machine learning to create patches for objects such as planes. These patches conceal the planes from machine learning object recognition tools. The paper is available on arxiv and published in SPIE Security + Defence. The work is featured in the media, see NRC, NewScientist, digitaltrends, yahoo!finance, nrc.nl, and the IMPORT AI blog.
  • Marcos Bueno, Arjen Hommersom and Peter Lucas had their paper Temporal Exceptional Model Mining using Dynamic Bayesian Networks accepted and presented at the AALTD workshop @ ECML/PKDD 2020.
  • Markus Klinik, Bernard van Gastel, Cynthia Kop, and Marko van Eekelen coauthor the paper "Skylines for Symbolic Energy Consumption Analysis", which has been presented at FMICS 2020.
  • Peter Achten is PC chair of TFPIE'2021, a workshop dedicated to the educational aspects of functional programming.
  • Marielle Stoelinga is PC co-chair of 24th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE 2021).
  • Abhisek Midya's and Frits Vaandrager's paper A Myhill-Nerode Theorem for Register Automata and Symbolic Trace Languages has been accepted for publication at ICTAC 2020.
  • Starting September 1, Robbert Krebbers joined our group as assistant professor, and Jules Jacobs and Thom Badings joined as PhD students. Welcome!
  • The Erasmus+ project Sustrainable - Promoting Sustainability as a Fundamental Driver in Software Development Training and Education, 2020-1-PT01-KA203-078646, in which the SWS group participates (Pieter Koopman) got funded.
  • Comma interfaces open the door to reliable high-tech systems, news article in Bits&Chips on the industrial impact of Jozef Hooman's work.
  • Bharat Garhewal and Frits Vaandrager coauthor the paper Grey-Box Learning of Register Automata, which has been accepted for publication at iFM 2020.
  • Starting August 1, Marnix Suilen has joined our group as PhD student on the NWO project Provably Correct Policies for Uncertain Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes. Welcome Marnix!
  • Nils Jansen coauthors the paper Synthesis of Provably Correct Autonomy Protocols for Shared Control which has been accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the paper Safe Reinforcement Learning using Probabilistic Shields which has been accepted as an invited paper at CONCUR 2020, and the paper Shield Synthesis for Reinforcement Learning which has been accepted at ISoLA 2020.
  • Daniel Strüber coauthors the paper Variability Representations in Class Models: An Empirical Assessment which has been accepted for publication at MODELS 2020.
  • Daniel Strüber coauthors the paper Feature-Oriented Defect Prediction which has been accepted for publication at SPLC 2020.
  • The ICGT 2020 paper coauthored by Daniel Strüber was awarded with the EASST best paper award.
  • Dennis Gross and Nils Jansen coauthor the paper Robustness Verification for Classifier Ensembles which has been accepted for publication at ATVA 2020.
  • Jana Wagemaker and Jurriaan Rot coauthor the paper Partially Observable Concurrent Kleene Algebra which has been accepted for publication at CONCUR 2020.
  • Jurriaan Rot coauthors the paper Preservation of Equations by Monoidal Monads which has been accepted for publication at MFCS 2020.
  • Daniel Strüber coauthors the paper Robotics Software Engineering: A Perspective from the Service Robotics Domain which has been accepted for publication at ESEC/FSE 2020.
  • Daniel Strüber coauthors the paper Graph Consistency as a Graduated Property: Consistency-Sustaining and -Improving Graph Transformations which has been accepted for publication at ICGT 2020.
  • Starting on May 1, Ike Mulder has joined our group as PhD student of Robbert Krebbers and Herman Geuvers. Welcome Ike!
  • Nils Jansen and Frits Vaandrager received a grant, together with Gethin Norman from Glasgow University, from the Radboud-Glasgow Collaboration Fund, entitled Safe Planning with Artificial Intelligence, April 2020.
  • Nils Jansen coauthors the papers Robust Policy Synthesis for Uncertain POMDPs via Convex Optimization and Verifiable RNN-Based Policies for POMDPs Under Temporal Logic Constraints which have been accepted for publication at IJCAI 2020.
  • The paper Constructing Finitary 1-Truncated Higher Inductive Types as Groupoid Quotients by Niels van de Weide has been accepted for LICS 2020.
  • Nils Jansen will give an invited talk at the NFM-AI-SAFETY workshop. The meeting will be virtual this year.
  • Nils Jansen coauthors the paper Strategy Synthesis for POMDPs in Robot Planning via Game-Based Abstractions which has been accepted for publication in the journal IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
  • On April 1 (!), Bisimulation as a Service (BaaS), an online service for bisimulation checking went online. BaaS, a start-up of Jurriaan Rot and Joshua Moerman, brings the latest scientific insights to industrial use, and thereby revolutionalises the world of equivalence checking.
  • Nils Jansen (iCIS, project leader), Jeroen Jansen (IMM), and Jan Driessen (Nexperia) received a Green IT voucher grant from Radboud University's Faculty of Science for their project GRIMES: Green Production via Model-based Reasoning.
  • Nils Jansen received a grant within NWO Open Competition call for the research proposal Provably Correct Policies for Uncertain Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes.
  • Starting on March 1, Daniel Strüber has joined our group as assistant professor. Welcome Daniel!
  • Starting on March 1, Zaharah Bukhsh has joined our group as postdoc in the NWO PrimaVera project. Welcome Zaharah!
  • Jurriaan Rot has been nominated for the Faculty of Science teaching award 2019.
  • Nils Jansen will serve on the program committees of IJCAI-PRICAI 2020, ICML 2020, NeurIPS 2020, SETTA 2020, QAVS 2020, and FASE 2021.
  • Nils Jansen is PC co-chair of the 18th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems (FORMATS 2020), September 1-3, 2020, Vienna, Austria
  • Jurriaan Rot is PC co-chair of the 15th IFIP WG 1.3 International Workshop on Coalgebraic Methods in Computer Science (CMCS'20) in Dublin, 25-26 April 2020.
  • Jurriaan Rot is PC co-chair of the EXPRESS/SOS'20 workshop in Vienna, 31 August 2020.
  • Thomas Nägele has successfully defended his PhD thesis CoHLA: Rapid Co-simulation Constructionon January 31, 2020, in the Aula of Radboud University, Nijmegen.
  • Jurriaan Rot coauthors the paper Learning Weighted Automata over Principal Ideal Domains, which has been accepted for publication at FoSSaCS 2020.
  • Nils Jansen coauthors the paper Scenario-Based Verification of Uncertain MDPs, which has been accepted for publication at TACAS 2020.
  • The paper Complexity of Automatic Sequences by Hans Zantema has been awarded the best paper award at LATA 2020.

2019

2018