Speakers

Bio: Franck van Breugel is an associate professor at York University. He holds an MSc from Eindhoven University of Technology and a PhD from the Free University Amsterdam. His research interests include modelling and verification of probabilistic systems, model checking Java code, and modelling and verification of business processes.

Bio: Salem Derisavi recently joined the IBM lab in Toronto. Derisavi holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering of Sharif University of Technology and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign. His research interests include minimization (lumping) algorithms for explicitly- and symbolically-represented CTMCs and DTMCs to tackle the infamous state-space explosion problem.

Bio: Shiva Nejati is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto. She received her B.Sc. from Sharif University of Technology in 2000 and her M.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 2003. She has received an ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award at the International Conference on Software Engineering held in 2007. Her research interests include software engineering and formal methods, in particular, model-based software development and automated software engineering.

Bio: Prakash Panangaden is a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. Before joining McGill in 1990, he was an assistant professor at Cornell University. Since joinning McGill, he has visited Amsterdam, Paris, Cambridge, Oxford and Aarhus. Panangaden holds an M.Sc. in Physics from I.I.T. Kanpur, studied relativity and quantum field theory at University of Chicago and received a Ph.D. in the same area at the University of Wisconsin. Panangaden studied somputer science at the University of Utah. His research interests include probabilistic systems, machine learning, security, epistemic logic, quantum computation, domain theory and relativity.

Bio: Vishwa Raman is a third year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is advised by Luca de Alfaro. Prior to his current studies, Vishwa worked for over a decade in the electronic design automation industry, developing verification products for Synopsys. His research interests include compositional reasoning, verification and synthesis.

Bio: Scott Smolka is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is also president and co-founder of Reactive Systems, Inc. He has been on the faculty at SUNY at Stony Brook since 1982. Smolka holds an A.B. and A.M. in Mathematics from Boston University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University. His work focuses on analysis techniques for reactive systems and he also has extensive experience in building verification tools, including Winston and the Concurrency Factory.

Bio: David Thorsley is a research associate in the Deparment of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington. He hold a B.E.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Western Ontario and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering: Systems from the University of Michigan. His research interests include systems and control, modeling and analysis of biochemical systems, fault detection and diagnosis, verification and validiation, and discrete event systems.

Bio: Herbert Wiklicky is Reader at the Department of Computing of Imperial College London. He holds degrees in Mathematical Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Technology and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same institutions. Wiklicky has worked at research institutions and universities in Austria (University of Vienna), The Netherlands (CWI), Japan (RIKEN), London (City University) and Germany (University of Mannheim), and is since 1999 at Imperial College London, currently he is on sabbatical at the University of Bologna (Italy). His current work focuses on probabilistic program analysis, quantitative models of computation and in semantics.

Bio: Mingsheng Ying is the Cheung Kong Professor at the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Technology and Systems of the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University. Ying graduated from Fuzhou Teachers College in Jiangxi in 1981. His research interests include quantum computation and quantum information, formal methods and logics in computer science, and foundations of artificial intelligence. He has published more than 100 papers in various international journals, including ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, Acta Informatica, Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Information and Computation, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Physical Review Letters and Theoretical Computer Science. He is also the author of the book entitled "Topology in Process Calculus: Approximate Correctness and Infinite Evolution of Concurrent Programs" published by Springer-Verlag in 2001.