Kim Guldstrand Larsen receives prestigious award

PRESS RELEASE

Professor from Aalborg University receives prestigious award.

Kim Guldstrand Larsen, Professor of Computer Science at Aalborg University and director of CISS, has been awarded the prestigious CAV Award 2013 for his research within modelling, simulation and verification of real-time IT systems and the development of the UPPAAL verification tool.

The research includes the development of techniques for the design and analysis of so-called real-time software systems. ”Our methods have been implemented in the UPPAAL tool and are applicable within a wide number of fields, which has been a contributing factor to its extensive use within both the academic world as well as industry. As the most visible proof of this, we can see that for several years, UPPAAL has been downloaded more than 30 times a day by users all over teh world," Kim Guldstrand Larsen says.

Embedded software systems  - i.e. software in e.g., cars, mobile phones, medical equipment, manufacturing equipment a.o. - are often safety-critical, which makes it crucial to ensure that they work correctly. It is particularly crucial that important functions concerning safety are performed within the set time limits: for instance that the deployment of an airbag - no matter what other entertaining secondary systems are running at a certain time - is guaranteed within very few micro seconds, no matter when a collision happens.  

UPPAAL is an automated analysis tool used for the modelling, simulation and verification of real-time systems. As opposed to other systems, UPPAAL is used during the design phase, which makes it possible to calculate early in the development process whether the system will work correctly.

”This research - which is based on advanced basic research within computer science - will potentially result in cheaper and shorter development time, and UPPAAL has already been used not only by Danish companies such as Novo Nordisk and Terma, but also by major international companies such as Toyota, Bosch and General Motors. There is thus a large amount of money and a huge potential at stake,” says Kim Guldstrand Larsen.

The CAV Award is presented at the Computer-Aided Verification conference, which is the leading computer-science conference within automated verification. The award is presented to identify and recognise outstanding research within the field, and 2013 was the first year the award was presented to researchers outside the USA. This year, Kim Guldstrand Larsen, Paul Pettersson and Wang Yi received the award and $10,000 at a ceremony on 17 July 2013 at the 25th CAV converence in St Petersburg, Russia.

More information

www.uppaal.org

www.cs.aau.dk/~kgl

cav2013.forsyte.at