Perspectives in Probabilistic Verification

Title: Perspectives in Probabilistic Verification
Speaker: Prof. Joost-Pieter Katoen RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Time: 4：00pm, Monday，June.30
Venue: Lecture Room,State Key Lab of Computer Science, Level 3 Building #5, Institute of Software, CAS

Abstract: Soon after the birth of the flourishing research area of model checking in the early eighties, researchers started to apply this technique to finite automata equipped with probabilities. The initial focus was on qualitative properties — e.g., does a program terminate with probability one? — but later efficient algorithms
were developed for quantitative questions as well.

Model checking of probabilistic models received quite some attention in the late nineties, and this popularity lasts until today. Some application areas are security, randomised distributed algorithms, systems biology, and classical performance analysis.

What is the current state of this field? Probabilistic verification, quo vadis? This talks surveys the main achievements during the last years, reports on some recent advances, and attempts to point out some research challenges for the coming years.

Bio of the speaker:

Joost-Pieter Katoen is a full professor at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany and heads the group on Software Modeling and Verification. He is also affiliated to the Formal Methods and Tools group of the Dutch
University of Twente. His research interests are in formal verification,concurrency theory, pointer analysis, semantics, timed and probabilistic systems. He co-authored about 100 papers in journals and international
conferences, is member of the ETAPS steering commitee, and editorial board member of the Journal of Software. He recently published a text-book on principles of model checking together with Christel Baier. Today he will address some perspectives in probabilistic model checking, a field in which he has been active since about 10 years.