Principled Systems Logo Principled Systems Group

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

The Principled Systems Group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) is led by Andrea Lattuada. We design, implement, and verify systems software, construed broadly[1] and focus on the advancement of verification tooling and methodology for systems verification.

We are interested in systems software verification as a way to substantially improve their safety and reliability, but to achieve this, the verification effort must be commensurate to the value it provides. We build (verified) systems, and extend the available tooling to find and fix inefficiencies.

Jointly with Derek Dreyer's group, we have open positions for PhD Students and Postdocs who are interested in working on Systems Software Verification, in particular focusing on making verification more practical and usable by engineers and on devising and leveraging advanced reasoning techniques. See my research profile for more details on my work, and feel free to get in touch.

Contact: (click to reveal)@mpi-sws.org

If you are interested in working with me on a Master Thesis, HiWi (UdS), or RIL project (cs@max planck, UdS), or similar, please get in touch. I receive a lot of emails. I try and respond to everyone — if I have not gotten back to you within a week, please send me a ping.

Verus Logo We co-lead the Verus project, Verus is a tool to rapidly verify the correctness of systems code written in Rust. The Verus project involves members from VMware Research, Microsoft Research, Carnegie Mellon University, ETH Zurich, University of Washington, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and others. There are a number of research and industry projects using and developing Verus: verus-lang.github.io/verus/publications-and-projects/.

Members

Andrea Lattuada

Group Leader

Website

Travis Hance

Postdoctoral Researcher
(joining in January 2025)

Website

Alexander Bai

Research Intern

Website

Affiliated Researchers and Collaborators

Matthias Brun

PhD Student
Assistant Researcher
ETH Zurich

Website

Laila Elbeheiry

PhD Student
Foundations of Programming
MPI-SWS

Website

Reto Achermann

Assistant Professor
Systopia Lab
University of British Columbia

Website

Johanna Polzin

Bachelor Student in Computer Science
ETH Zurich

Website

Recent Peer-reviewed Publications

[1] Inspired by Systopia's definition of the scope of Systems research.