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CAV Award 2023

Professor Jakob Rehof Awarded International Prize for Computer Science

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A photo of a man with glasses wearing a blue shirt and jacket. © Sascha Kreklau
Professor Jakob Rehof has held the Chair for Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science since 2006.

In Paris this summer, the International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV) conferred the “CAV Award 2023” on Professor Jakob Rehof from the Department of Computer Science. This international prize is awarded annually for fundamental contributions to the field of computer aided verification. Jakob Rehof, Professor of Software Engineering at the Department of Computer Science, was commended for introducing context-bounded analysis and its application to the systematic testing of concurrent programs. He shares this year’s award with colleagues from Microsoft, Meta and the University of Wisconsin.

Concurrent programs involve multiple processes that are executed simultaneously and can influence each other during execution. Hence, the analysis of such programs is particularly complex, and fundamental questions are not computable. Such fundamental questions include, for example, the question of reachability or whether a concurrent system can fail. Professor Jakob Rehof, together with his colleague Shaz Qadeer, already showed back in 2005 that restricting executions with a bounded number of contexts leads to computability. Accordingly, a large number of reachability questions of practical interest can in theory be answered automatically. Later work, which built on the fundamental findings of Rehof and Qadeer, has been able to apply context-bounded analysis to the systematic testing of concurrent programs in practice.

“The nominated work had an essential impact on academia and industry, leading to numerous theoretical, methodological, and practical developments and efficient tools used in large-scale software development,” said the CAV jury, stating its reasons for conferring this year’s award on Professor Rehof and his colleagues Akash Lal and Madan Musuvathi from Microsoft Research, Shaz Qadeer from Meta Research and Thomas Reps from the University of Wisconsin. The award is worth US$10,000.

About Professor Jakob Rehof

Jakob Rehof has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at TU Dortmund University since 2006, where he also holds the Chair for Software Engineering. In addition, from 2006 to 2021 he was a member of the management board of the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering (ISST) in Dortmund. From 1998 to 2006, Jakob Rehof was a researcher at Microsoft Research in the USA. He studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Copenhagen and earned his doctoral degree there in the Department of Computer Science.

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