A Tour of Programming Support for Decentralized Data-Driven Software, Static Code Analyses, and AI - A Glimpse of Research at Software Technology Lab, TU Darmstadt

Speaker: Mira Mezini, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany

Abstract:
Prof. Mezini will give a high-level overview of the research profile of her lab at TU Darmstadt and selectively elaborate on specific topics. The main focus will be on programming support for decentralized data-driven software with formally-proven consistency and security guarantees as offered by REScala (rescala-lang.com) - a library-based extension of Scala. Subject of time availability, she will touch upon two more topics concerning modular programming of static analyses and support for it in the OPAL static analysis framework, as well as preliminary work at the intersection between programming and artificial intelligence. 

Biography: 
Mira Mezini is Professor of Computer Science at Technische Universität Darmstadt (TUDa). She has taught and conducted research as a visiting professor at Northeastern University in Boston in the USA (1997 - 1999) and at Lancaster University in the UK (2013 - 2016). Mira was Dean (2013-2014) of Computer Science and Vice President of TU Darmstadt (2014-2019), is representing TUDa in the Board of the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE and co-leading hessian.AI, the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence. 
Mira is known for her research on programming languages and tools with special focus on support for secure and reliable distributed software, and on methods for automated software analysis with special focus on cybersecurity and privacy. More recently, she is addressing research questions at the interface between software engineering and artificial intelligence (AI), specifically questions concerning programming languages for neuro-symbolic AI, as well as qualitative and secure code models for automated software development. Mira has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals and conferences in the areas of software engineering and programming languages, and her work is widely cited. She has received various research awards, including IBM Eclipse Innovation Awards (2005 and 2006), a Google Research Award (2017), German IT Security Award (2014). In 2012 she received an ERC Advanced Grant and was elected to the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) in 2016.
She also actively serves the research community. She regularly serves in program committees resp. editorial boards of SE and PL conferences resp. journals and has been resp. is program chair of ESEC/FSE (2013), ECOOP (2008), OOPSLA (2023). She was/is member of the Computer Science Review Board of the German Research Foundation (2016 - 2022), the ERC CoG Panel (2014 - 2020), the international START/ Wittgenstein Jury of the FWF Austria (since 2019), the Executive Committee of ACM SIGPLAN (2018 - 2021), and the ERC Scientific Council Search Committee; she was recently elected to the Senate of the German Research Foundation. 

Host: Prof. Patrick Eugster