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Skræddersyet kursus skal tænde de unge forskeres indre iværksætterild

21. juni 2022

Skræddersyet kursus skal tænde de unge forskeres indre iværksætterild

I slutningen af maj samledes 55-60 yngre forskere fra de datalogiske institutter på tværs af hele landet for at blive undervist i iværksætteri. Kurset, der er et samarbejde mellem DIREC, Pioneer Centre for AI, Fonden for Entreprenørskab og Danish Data Science Academy, har både givet grobund for konkrete startups og en introduktion til det økosystem for innovation, der er på de danske universiteter.

Vigtigst af alt så fik forskerne plantet et mindset i at tænke i entreprenørskab, forklarer Mark Riis, Head of Innovation på DTU Compute, og idémand til kurset samt leder af DIRECs arbejde med entreprenørskab.

“Det har stor værdi at plante det her mindset, fordi forskere er vant til at arbejde på en anden måde og først publicere, når det sidste punktum er sat. Entreprenørskab handler om at eksperimentere og teste sin idé af med omverdenen og markedet, således at man hele tiden får feedback. Udover at få skabt det her mindset så har kurset også været med til at tænde en ild hos nogle af deltagerne til at starte en virksomhed på baggrund af deres forskning. Det bliver spændende at se, hvordan de konkrete startup-ideer udvikler sig.”

Det intense tredageskursus har også handlet om at introducere deltagerne til det økosystem for innovation, som findes rundt om på de danske universiteter. Det er ifølge Mark Riis vigtigt, at man som forsker forstår, at man har langt bedre mulighed for at blive hjulpet, når man er en del af økosystemet med mentorer og investorer.

“Jeg ser kurset som en samarbejdsplatform, fordi det at lave en startup er en holdøvelse, hvor man bliver nødt til at kende til andre fagligheder. Det gælder både i forhold til at møde andre forskere, som måske arbejder med andre fagligheder inden for computer science. Men det gælder også i forhold til at få øjnene op for at arbejde med venturekapital tidligt i forløbet, og derfor havde vi inviteret en række early stage venturekapitalister med, som var interesseret i at se, hvad der sker inden for forskningen lige nu.”

Udover en introduktion til økosystemet blev deltagerne også introduceret til andre områder, som hvordan man kommercialiserer sin forskningsidé eller software, hvorvidt man skal arbejde med open source, hvordan man beskytter sin software, og hvordan man tænker etikken ind og sikrer sig, at man ikke misbruger brugernes data. Deltagerne fik desuden en introduktion til begrebet ML Ops, som handler om, hvordan man går fra teoretiske AI-modeller til software, som man kan bruge i et produkt, og som skaber værdi for kunderne.

“Iværksætteri er et håndværk i sig selv. Vi har vendt det mere generiske, men samtidig forsøgt at skræddersy kurset til det digitale område, og det tror jeg er en af grundene til, at mange af deltagerne synes, at det var interessant.”

Nu skal kurset evalueres, og så skal det skaleres, så det kan tilbydes til flere unge forskere fremover. Men allerede til oktober er der en followup for deltagerne til dette års Digital Tech Summit. Her får alle deltagerne mulighed for at pitche deres forretningsidé og mødes med mulige investorer, så de unge forskere bringes videre ind i økosystemet.

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MOVEP 2022: Five Intensive Days on Modelling and Verification

17 JUNE 2022

MOVEP 2022: Five Intensive Days on Modelling and Verification

Automated systems like self-driving cars and AI-based decision support are becoming an increasingly large part of our everyday lives, and so is the need for modelling and verification of the software running these systems. At the MOVEP 2022 Summer School, hosted by the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, leading researchers, students and people from the industry convened to discuss challenges and opportunities within this field.

By Stig Andersen, Aalborg University

The five-day MOVEP Summer School 2022 (June 13-17) on modelling and verification of parallel processes had attracted 70+ participants, primarily PhD students, but also people from the industry.

With the lecture hall of the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology right at Aalborg’s harbour front as a great venue, they enjoyed a packed programme of talks and tutorials from 11 leading researchers on model checking, controller synthesis, software verification, temporal logics, real-time and hybrid systems, stochastic systems, security, run-time verification, etc.

An exciting field

One of the speakers was Christel Baier, Professor and Head of the chair for Algebraic and Logic Foundations of Computer Science at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Dresden, and together with Joost-Pieter Katoen, the author of a key publication in the field, Principles of Model Checking (MIT Press, 2008). She has been working within the broad field of verification and analysis techniques for stochastic operational models for more than twenty years.

– I really had not expected to work so long within this area, but as it often turns out in science, apparently simple problems are not at all simple and will require more research. So, if the students at this summer school would take the message that this is an exciting and very important field and choose to explore it further, I would be very happy. MOVEP is a very nice event, and being able to come to Denmark and not least being able to meet again after the Corona shutdown is really great, she says.

Application in different fields

Another speaker was Nir Piterman, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Gothenburg and Chalmers, and a prominent figure within formal verification and automata theory. He kicked off the summer school programme Monday morning with a tutorial on reactive synthesis, which is a technique for automatically generating correct-by-construction reactive systems from high-level descriptions.

 – In my tutorial, I tried to give the participants a taste of the so-called discrete two-player turn-based games technique, where you think about the environment as one player and the system as another player. The interaction is like a game between the two, and the system has to come up with a strategy to satisfy some goal, he explains.

Nir Piterman also sees an event like MOVEP as a very good opportunity for young researchers to be exposed to concepts and techniques that they would not necessarily be exposed to otherwise.

– It is my hope that the talks and tutorials at this event will fertilize their work and provide them with new ideas about how to apply these techniques in different fields. One possible usage of two-player games is synthesis, but the usage could be wider and potentially applied to other problems, he says.

Nir Piterman is currently the holder of an ERC consolidator grant to study the usage of reactive synthesis for multiple collaborating programs.

Explainability

In her tutorial, Christel Baier focused on explication, which refers to a mathematical concept that in some way sheds light on why a verification process has returned a given result.

– Explainability is important. We have to make systems more understandable to everyone – scientists, designers, users, etc. Today, everybody is an IT user, so this is not only relevant for computer scientists, she says.
According to Christel Baier, there is a higher purpose:

– Since systems make decisions, users should have the opportunity to understand why decisions were made. Moreover, users should be supported in making decisions by themselves and be given an understanding of the configuration of these systems and their possible effects. Again, it comes down to the question of cause and effect, which was a recurring theme of my tutorial.

The research on the results presented by Christel Baier at her tutorial has been carried out within and is motivated by the missions of the collaborative projects “Center for Perspicuous Computing (CPEC)” and “Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI)”.

Correct-by-construction

Research within modelling and verification of parallel processes may also explore the question: Could we automatically generate systems that perform exactly according to the specifications instead of checking afterwards that they do? Nir Piterman dealt with this topic in his tutorial.

– Techniques to automatically generate correct-by-construction reactive systems from high-level descriptions have been explored in academia for quite a number of years. It has proven to work in some domains, but it would not be realistic to set as an ambition to build one synthesizer that you feed a specification to and expect it to auto-generate safe and error-free systems for all possible programming domains, he says.

According to Nir Piterman, the most successful applications so far have been within robotics. However, this success makes us think about what is the meaning of correct-by-construction.

– What does “correct” really mean? If it means that the system does exactly what was described in the specification, what happens if the specification is flawed? So, the focus of the correctness problem might change: Rather than making sure that the system matches the specification, the task is to ensure that the specification is thorough enough and reflects what the designer had in mind.

FURTHER INFORMATION

  • MOVEP 2022 is hosted by the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University (primary organizer Martin Zimmermann, Associate Professor) and co-sponsored by DIREC an S4OS.
  • The first five editions of MOVEP took place in Nantes (France) every other year from 1994 to 2002. It then moved to Brussels (Belgium) in 2004, Bordeaux (France) in 2006, Orléans (France) in 2008, Aachen (Germany) in 2010, Marseille (France) in 2012, Nantes (France) in 2014, Genova (Italy) in 2016, Cachan (France) in 2018 and online in 2020.
  • More info on the MOVEP 2022 website.

CONTACT
Martin Zimmermann
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University
Mail: mzi@cs.aau.dk
Phone: +45 9940 8770

Stig Andersen
Communications Officer
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University
Mail: stan@cs.aau.dk
Phone: +45 4019 7682

Professor Nir Piterman, University of Gothenburg and Chalmers

Professor Christel Baier, Technische Universität Dresden

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MOVEP 2022

PhD summer school

MOVEP 2022

15th Summer School on Modelling and Verification of Parallel Processes

MOVEP is a five-day summer school on modelling and verification of infinite state systems. It aims to bring together researchers and students working in the fields of control and verification of concurrent and reactive systems.

MOVEP 2022 will consist of ten invited tutorials. In addition, there will be special sessions that allow PhD students to present their on-going research (each talk will last around 20 minutes). Extended abstracts (1-2 pages) of these presentations will be published in informal proceedings.

The organisation committee is closely monitoring the COVID situation. Currently, we are planning for an in-person school in Aalborg with the possibility for remote participation for those that cannot attend in person. Should it become necessary, the school will be held virtually.

Speakers
  • Giovanni Bacci, AAU
    From Bisimulaltions to Metrics via Couplings
  • David Baelde, ENS RENNES & IRISA
    Formal Proofs of Cryptographic Protocols with Squirrel
  • Christel Baier, Technische Universität Dresden
    From verification to causality-based explications
  • Wojciech Czerwinski, University of Warsaw
    The reachability problem for vector addition systems
  • Bartek Klin, Oxford University
    Computation theory over sets with atoms
  • Laura Kovacs, Vienna University of Technology
    First-order theorem proving and vampire
  • Anca Muscholl, Labri & Université Bordeaux
    A view on string transducers
  • Nir Piterman, Chalmers University of Technology
    Reactive synthesis Amaury Pouly, IRIF – Linear Dynamical Systems: Reachability and invariant generation
  • Renaud Vilmart, LMF & INRIA
    How to verify quantum processes
Target group

PhD students

Sponsors
  • Dept. of Computer Science, Aalborg University
  • The VILLUM Investigator Center S4OS “Scalable analysis and Synthesis of Safe, Secure and Optimal Strategies for Cyber-Physical Systems”
  • DIREC – Digital Research Centre Denmark