News

The emergence of the digital economy has led to new cybersecurity challenges for Danish manufacturing companies. Small- and medium-sized manufacturers are particularly vulnerable to attacks such as ransomware, theft of intellectual property, and sabotage, and new research from SDU has shown low preparedness and lack of knowledge about cybersecurity in this sector.   To protect Danish manufacturers from these attacks, Industriens Fond has awarded SDU researchers 8,5 million DKK (~1.14 million EUR) for the project CyberSMV: Cyber Security and Business Continuity. The 2.5-year project is led by Professor Jan Stentoft and will involve ACP members Peter Mayer, Fabrizio Montesi, and Marco Peressotti as participants.

Assistant Professor Robin Kaarsgaard Sales will be attending POPL 2024 in London next week—come say hi! Robin is a coauthor of the paper “With a Few Square Roots, Quantum Computing Is as Easy as Pi”, which will be presented in the Quantum Computing track. A layperson’s summary of the paper is also available and has been featured in ACM’s showcase on Kudos.

Our head of section Fabrizio Montesi has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council! The grant will disburse € 2 million over the next 5 years to investigate reasoning, expressivity, and development of choreographic programming for distributed systems. Read more about it here.

Congratulations Fabrizio!

Invited talks and appearances

• Ruben Niederhagen gave an invited talk at PQCSM 2023 on the topic of code-based cryptography and participated in a panel discussion. PQCSM is an international workshop hosted in Taipei and affiliated with the IACR conference TCC.
• Robin Kaarsgaard Sales gave an invited talks at RC 2023 and NCM 29 based on his paper “The Quantum Effect: A Recipe for Quantum Π”, which appeared at QPL 2023.
• Dan Plyukhin appeared on the Elixir Wizards podcast to discuss the future of garbage collection in actor frameworks such as Akka and Erlang.

Accepted papers

• Peter Mayer, Yixin Zou, Byron M Lowens, Hunter A Dyer, Khue Le, Florian Schaub, Adam J Aviv: Awareness, Intention, (In)Action: Individuals’ Reactions to Data Breaches at TOCHI 2023
• Luís Cruz-Filipe, Fabrizio Montesi, and Marco Peressotti: A Formal Theory of Choreographic Programming in the Journal of Automated Reasoning (2023)
• Luís Cruz-Filipe and Fabrizio Montesi: Now It Compiles! Certified Automatic Repair of Uncompilable Protocols at ITP 2023
• Luís Cruz-Filipe, Eva Graversen, Lovro Lugović, Fabrizio Montesi, and Marco Peressotti: Modular Compilation for Higher-order Functional Choreographies at ECOOP 2023
• Luís Cruz-Filipe, Fabrizio Montesi, and Robert R. Rasmussen: Keep me out of the loop: a more flexible choreographic projection at LPAR 2023
• Saverio Giallorenzo, Fabrizio Montesi, Marco Peressotti, and Florian Rademacher: LEMMA2Jolie: A tool to generate microservice APIs from domain models at SCP 2023
• Jacques Carette, Chris Heunen, Robin Kaarsgaard and Amr Sabry. The Quantum Effect: a recipe for QuantumPi at QPL 2023
• Luís Cruz-Filipe, Sofia Kostopoulou, Fabrizio Montesi, and Jonas Vistrup. μXL: Explainable Lead Generation with Microservices and Hypothetical Answers at ESOCC 2023

In 2017, the US-American standardization agency NIST started a standardization process for the next generation of cryptographic schemes that are designed to withstand attacks aided by quantum computers. First cryptographic schemes have been selected in 2022 for standardization - but NIST has asked for the submission of additional digital signature schemes. As part of two international research groups, Ruben Niederhagen contributed to the two submissions: WAVE and MEDS. They are based on different mathematical constructions, but they both have the goal to provide secure digital signatures for a future world where an attacker might be equipped with a large and powerful quantum computer.

DisCoTec 2023 is coming up next week, and ACP members will be there! They will be presenting three accepted papers:

• Reasoning about Choreographic Programs (COORDINATION 2023) by Luís Cruz-Filipe, Eva Graversen, Fabrizio Montesi and Marco Peressotti
• JoT: A Jolie Framework for Testing Microservices (🏆 Winner of the best artifact award at COORDINATION 2023!) by Saverio Giallorenzo, Fabrizio Montesi, Marco Peressotti, Florian Rademacher and Narongrit Unwerawattana
• Certified Compilation of Choreographies with hacc (FORTE 2023) by Luís Cruz-Filipe, Lovro Lugović and Fabrizio Montesi

Hope to see you there!

We are happy to share that our section has just gained four new members!

Peter Mayer and Robin Kaarsgaard are joining us as assistant professors in usable security and quantum computing, while Dan Plyukhin and Matteo Acclavio are joining us as post-docs in programming languages and distributed systems.

The Microservices and DevOps course taught by Jacopo Mauro is organizing a microservice workshop. The workshop is open to everyone with basic skills in Java and will be given by Christian Clausen, the founder of Mistware and author of the book Five Lines of Code.

Find more information and instructions on how to sign up here.

The Faculty of Science awards Jacopo Mauro with this year’s Innovation Prize for bringing SDU’s knowledge within education and research into play in a completely new and innovative way. See the Dean surprise Jacopo with the award here.

We are very excited to announce that Jonas Vistrup will be joining our section as a PhD student!

NIST has recently announced the selection of the first four algorithms of their 2016 Call for Proposals for Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization.

Ruben Niederhagen has been directly involved in the development of one of the winning digital signature algorithms, SPHINCS+, and has shared some of his thoughts here.

On Week 33 (15^th to 19^th August) Jacopo Mauro and Marco Peressotti lectured at the Danish Cyber-security Summer School held at the DTU Diplom institute in Ballerup.

Mauro lectured on Site Engineering Reliability culture and techniques and the recent declination of DevSecOps. Peressotti lectured on Formal Methods fundamentals and main techniques and gave a tutorial about formal specifications using TLA+.

We are inviting applications applications for postdoctoral research fellowships in programming languages and distributed systems. The proposed starting date is September 2022, with room for flexibility. The position is for a duration of up to three years

Application deadline: 22 May 2022.

The positions are financed by the project “Choreographies for Connected IT Systems”, led by Fabrizio Montesi. The project deals with the development of theory and tools based on programming languages for the development of distributed systems. Examples of topics that the project deals with include choreographic programming, compilers, distributed programming, microservices, session types, semantics of programming languages, and interactive theorem proving. The project is flexible, with opportunities to delve into single topics or to explore synergies among them.

Interested candidates can find further details at this page and direct any questions to the project lead, Fabrizio Montesi.

We are happy to welcome Narongrit Unwerawattana to our section, who will be working as a scientific software developer!

We are pleased to announce that Sofia Kostopoulou will be joining our section as a PhD student!

We are inviting applications for tenure-track assistant professor positions in Computer Science. We are looking for new colleagues who can strengthen or add to our competences in the research areas and topics of our section.

Application deadline: 15 February 2022.

Interested candidates can find further details at this page and direct any questions to the section head, Fabrizio Montesi.

An art exhibition called “Data Choreographies” will be opening on the 4^th of November at Catch (Kulturværftet, Helsingør, Denmark), with brilliant art inspired by our research on choreographic programming! The exhibition will stay open for more than a month, and will then move to other places.

More information and event details can be found here.

On the 22^nd of June, the paper “Multiparty Languages: The Choreographic and Multitier Cases” by Fabrizio Montesi and Marco Peressotti received a Distinguished Paper Award at ECOOP 2021.

On the 17^th of June, Marco Peressotti gave a lecture on Security by Design and Formal Methods at DigitalDays, an event organised by Denmark’s cluster organization for digital technologies DigitalLead.

We are happy to welcome three new members: Eva Graversen, Lovro Lugović, and Valentino Picotti. Eva will join the group as a post-doc, Lovro and Valentino as PhD students.

Marco Peressotti gave an invited talk at the International Conference on the Future of Standards in CyberSecurity organised by the Polish Institute of Telecomunications in collaboration with the International Standards Organisation, the International Electrotechnical Commission, and the Polish Chamber of Commerce for Electronics and Telecommunications.

Jacopo Mauro, together with Roberto Amadini and Maurizio Gabbrielli, won the Silver medal at the 2020 MiniZinc Challenge, an international annual competition of constraint programming solvers on a variety of benchmarks.

On Week 35 (24^th to 28^th August) Jacopo Mauro and Marco Peressotti lectured at the Danish Cyber-security Summer School held at the DTU Diplom institute in Ballerup.

Mauro lectured on Site Engineering Reliability culture and techniques and the recent declination of DevSecOps. Peressotti lectured on Formal Methods fundamentals and main techniques and gave a tutorial about formal specifications using TLA+.

On March 2^nd, Forskerzonen — one of the major danish popular-science publication agencies — released an interview to Luís Cruz-Filipe on how to achieve the best result in the implementation of artificial intelligence in society.

On February 7^th, Luís Cruz-Filipe presented the paper “Hypothetical Answers to Continuous Queries over Data Streams” at the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

On January 28^th Larisa Safina successfully defended her PhD Thesis “Formal methods and patterns for microservices”.

Fabrizio Montesi has received a prestigious Villum Foundation Villum Young Investigator grant, for a total of DKK 7.1 millions (~1 million EUR). The Villum Young Investigator Programme funds particularly talented young researchers in the technical and natural sciences.

Jacopo Mauro, together with Cesar Sanchez (IMDEA Software Institute, Spain), organised PhD-iFM’19, a PhD Symposium at the 15th International Conference on integrated Formal Methods (iFM). Theme of this edition of the symposium was “Formal Methods: Algorithms, Tools and Applications”. This edition’s award was assigned to Debasmita Lohar, for the paper: “Sound Probabilistic Numerical Error Analysis”.

Jacopo Mauro, together with Roberto Amadini and Maurizio Gabbrielli, won the Silver medal at the 2019 MiniZinc Challenge, an international annual competition of constraint programming solvers on a variety of benchmarks.

On Week 34th (19^th to 23^th August) Jacopo Mauro and Saverio Giallorenzo lectured at the Cyber-security Summer School held at the KEA institute in Copenhagen.

Mauro lectured on DevOps culture and techniques and the recent declination of DevSecOps. Giallorenzo lectured on Microservice security concepts.

On June 19^th and 20^th, Jacopo Mauro, Larisa Safina, Marco Peressotti, and Saverio Giallorenzo attended edition 2019 of the International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques (DisCoTec 2019).

Safina presented a short talk on “Ephemeral Data Handling in Microservices”. Giallorenzo and Peressotti presented the paper “No More, No Less - A Formal Model for Serverless Computing” accepted at Coordination.

On June 13^th, Luís Cruz-Filipe gave a talk at the 25^th International Conference on Types for Proofs and Programs (TYPES’19) about formalising “Choreographies in Coq”, a joint work with Fabrizio Montesi and Marco Peressotti.

The second edition of the International Conference on Microservices (Microservices 2019) just ended. The 3-day event successfully brought together many international practitioners and researches interested in the software paradigm of microservices. It consisted of 5 invited keynotes and 30 contributed talks peer-reviewed by an international committee of experts from both industry and academia. This edition featured the first satellite for the conference series: a hackathon for university students.

On Jannuary 18^th, Marco Peressotti presented the paper “Better Late Than Never: A Fully Abstract Semantics for Classical Processes” at 46th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (https://popl19.sigplan.org/).

Marco Peressotti and Saverio Giallorenzo together with Florian Rademacher and Sabine Sachweh, from the IDiAL Institute in Dortmund, are organising the second edition of the International Conference on Microservices. The conference will take place between the 19th and 21st of February 2019.

On 2 November 2018, Fabrizio Montesi gave an invited seminar at the Driving IT conference, organised by the Danish Society of Engineers. Fabrizio’s talk was on “Jolie, the microservice-oriented programing language”. You can get the slides from the conference webpage for the seminar: https://universe.ida.dk/driving-it/talere-2018/fabrizio-montesi/.

On October 25^th, Marco Peressotti gave a talk at the 30^th Nordic Workshop on Programming Theory (NWPT’18) about “Choreographies and Communication Failures”.

On October 26^th, Saverio Giallorenzo presented the paper “ChIP” at CoopIS 2018.

On September 13^th, Fabrizio Montesi joined a panel of experts at the Robotics Technology Conference on the topic “How do we attract the best brains?”. The panel discussed how to create better conditions for the attraction and the integration of international talents in Denmark.

Edition 2019 of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (a primary gathering forum for theoretical and applied researchers in computing) will host the first edition of MiDOS: Microservices, DevOps, and Service-Oriented Architecture (MiDOS). The track, chaired by Luís Cruz-Filipe, Elisabetta Di Nitto, and Jacopo Mauro, is the natural continuation of the previous Service-Oriented Architecture and Programming (SOAP) track.

Jacopo Mauro, together with Roberto Amadini and Maurizio Gabbrielli, won the Silver medal at the 2018 MiniZinc Challenge, an international annual competition of constraint programming solvers on a variety of benchmarks.

On August 7^th, Luís Cruz-Filipe attended the prestigious International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), joining a panel of world experts on the topic “The strengths and flaws of machine-assisted proofs”, on how computers can assist us in proving mathematical results/theorems.

On June 28^th, we had a kickoff collaboration meeting with members of the Software Engineering section of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Southern Denmark: Kati Kuusinen, Sanja Lazarova-Molnar, and Elena Markoska. The collaboration will include shared research projects, lectures, and industrial summer courses on Microservices and DevOps.

On June 19^th, Saverio Giallorenzo presented the paper “Applied Choreographies” at FORTE 2018.

On June 7^th, Fabrizio Montesi and Saverio Giallorenzo, visited Orgbogen, the largest web-based dictionary company in Denmark, together with other researchers of the Algorithms and Data Science and Statics groups from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (IMADA), SDU.

On May 21^st, 2018 Saverio Giallorenzo co-chaired the Second International Workshop on Microservices: Agile and DevOps Experience (MADE18), co-located with the XP2018 conference in Porto, Portugal. The workshop has been a success, with 30+ attendees and highly participated presentations.

On April 10^th, Marco Peressotti gave a talk at the 33^rd ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC’18) about the paper “Communications in Choreographies, Revisited”. On April 11^th, Janine Weber presented a poster at SAC’18 about the paper “From the decorator pattern to circuit breakers in microservices”.

Saverio Giallorenzo is co-chairing the Second International Workshop on Microservices: Agile and DevOps Experience (MADE18) taking place on May 21st, 2018 and co-located with the XP2018 conference in Porto, Portugal.

Marco Peressotti joined the Dagstuhl Seminar on Algorithmic Cheminformatics to give an invited talk on coinductive techniques for the study of concurrent complex systems. The event kickstarted new research projects with the Algorithms research group at IMADA thus fostering the fruitful collaboration between our groups.

During the discussion panels at Microservices 2017, participants recognised the importance of constituting a communal place where international people from research institutions, private companies, universities, and public organisations (like municipalities) can share knowledge and foster collaborations about microservices.

ACP organised the first International Conference on Microservices with the aim to provide a forum for the discussion of all aspects of designing and programming microservice architectures. Both theoretical and experimental contributions are welcome, on topics ranging from formal frameworks to industrial experience reports and demonstrations.

Edition 2016 of the Meeting on Microservices (MoM2016) took place on December 20^th, 2016. The event has been mainly organised by ItalianaSoftware, a close industrial collaborator of ACP.