News – MSR-IMDEASW Joint Research Center

3nd Microsoft Research and IMDEA Software Institute Collaboration Workshop (MICW 2016)

admin — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 14:23:08 +0000

The third Workshop of the Joint Research Center between Microsoft Research and the IMDEA Software Institute is taking place May 3-4, 2016, at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. The workshop is aimed at discussing collaborative work on chosen software projects and, where possible, to bring those advances to Microsoft’s businesses.

The workshop will focus on three topics:

• Security and Cryptography
• Programming Languages and Verification
• Multicore and Cloud Computing

It is organized by Markulf Kohlweiss and Judith Bishop from Microsoft Research and by Manuel Hermenegildo and Alexey Gotsman from the IMDEA Software Institute.

The workshop brings together researchers and students to discuss their collaborative work on hot topics in software in order to advance the state of the art and, where possible, to bring those advances to market.

The 2-day workshop include the following keynote speakers:

Pierre Ganty holds a joint PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Brussels, Belgium and from the University of Genova, Italy that he obtained late 2007. After his PhD, Pierre did a nearly two year postdoc at the University of California, Los Angeles. Pierre joined the IMDEA Software institute in the Fall 2009 as a tenure-track assistant research professor. He was granted tenure and promoted to associate research professor in December 2015.

Dr. Brian A. LaMacchia — “bal” to his friends — is the Director of the Security & Cryptography group within Microsoft Research (MSR) where his team conducts basic and applied research and advanced development. Brian is also a founding member of the Microsoft Cryptography Review Board and consults on security and cryptography architectures, protocols and implementations across the company. Before moving into MSR in 2009, Brian was the Architect for cryptography in Windows Security, Development Lead for .NET Framework Security and Program Manager for core cryptography in Windows 2000. Prior to joining Microsoft, Brian was a member of the Public Policy Research Group at AT&T Labs—Research.
In addition to his responsibilities at Microsoft, Brian is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University-Bloomington and an Affiliate Faculty member of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Brian is also the General Chair of Crypto 2016 and an ex officio member of the Board of Directors of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). Brian received S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1990, 1991, and 1996, respectively.

More information can be found at the MSR-IMDEASW Joint Research Center web site and the Workshop site at Microsoft Research

2nd Microsoft Research and IMDEA Software Institute Collaboration Workshop (MICW 2015)

admin — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 10:51:16 +0000

The second Workshop of the Joint Research Center between Microsoft Research and the IMDEA Software Institute is taking place April 9-10, 2015, at the IMDEA Software building in Madrid. The workshop is aimed at discussing collaborative work on chosen software projects and, where possible, to bring those advances to Microsoft’s businesses.

The workshop continues to focus on the following three projects:

– Scalable and correct data management in the cloud
– Verification for cryptography and security
– Secure Distributed Programming

It is organized by Judith Bishop and Cedric Fournet from Microsoft Research and by Manuel Hermenegildo and Alexey Gotsman from the IMDEA Software Institute.

The 2-day workshop include the following keynote speakers:

Phil Bernstein is a distinguished scientist in the Database Group of Microsoft Research Redmond. Bernstein is also an affiliate professor at the University of Washington and frequent committee member or chair of conferences such as VLDB and SIGMOD. He won the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 1994. Bernstein is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and an elected Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Currently, he is working on a distributed systems programming framework, called Project Orleans: Distributed Virtual Actors for Programmability and Scalability.

Aleks Nanevski is an Assistant Research Professor at the IMDEA Software Institute which he joined in the Fall 2009. Prior to that, Nanevski was a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University under supervision of Prof. Edmund Clarke, at Harvard University under supervision of Prof. Greg Morrisett, and at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. Aleksandar holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, obtained in August 2004. Nanevski is working on type systems and structured proofs for concurrent software verification.

More information can be found at the MSR-IMDEASW Joint Research Center web site and the Workshop site at Microsoft Research.

*New post on the Microsoft Research Connections blog regarding the last 2nd MICW 2015, by Judith Bishop and Cédric Fournet.

1st Microsoft Research and IMDEA Software Institute Collaboration Workshop (MICW 2014)

admin — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 08:10:43 +0000

The first Workshop of the Joint Research Center between Microsoft Research and the IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid took place April 2–4, 2014, at the IMDEA Software building in Madrid. The workshop aimed at reinforcing the collaboration between these two institutions on the following topics:

Cryptography and Privacy
Concurrency and Memory Models
Programming Languages and Verification

The Workshop was also the launch activity of the Center, at which researchers from both sides work on topics of joint interest. It was organized by Judith Bishop and Georges Gonthier from Microsoft Research and by Gilles Barthe and Manuel Hermenegildo from the IMDEA Software Institute.

These workshops bring together researchers and students to discuss their collaborative work on hot topics in software in order to advance the state of the art and, where possible, to bring those advances to market. The focus of the first workshop is on verification (coordinated by Alexey Gotsman and Francesco Logozzo), programming languages (coordinated by Pierre-Yves Strub and Georges Gonthier), and security (coordinated by Juan Caballero and Ben Livshits).

The 3 days workshop included relevant keynote speakers:

Martín Abadi is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. He has been a Professor at UC Santa Cruz, where he is now Professor Emeritus, and also held the Chair “Informatique et sciences numériques” at the Collège de France. Earlier, he studied at Stanford University and worked at Digital’s System Research Center and other industrial labs. His research is mainly on computer and network security, programming languages, and specification and verification methods.

Ben Livshits Ben Livshits is a research scientist at Microsoft Research and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. He received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Math from Cornell University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, respectively. Ben’s research interests include application of analysis techniques to finding errors in programs, and, more generally, privacy, security, and performance of large programs.

Alexy Gotsman Alexy Gotsman is a tenure-track Assistant Research Professor at the IMDEA Software Institute. Before joining IMDEA, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, where received his Ph.D. His research interests are in software verfication, particularly, in developing reasoning techniques and automated verification tools for real-world concurrent systems software.

More information at:

Microsoft Research – IMDEA Software Institute Joint Research Center Presentation

admin — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 07:03:57 +0000

Microsoft Research and the IMDEA Software Institute officially presented their new Joint Research Center on April 4, 2014. The collaboration was formalized in late 2013 with the objective of framing and boosting the significant research collaborations between Microsoft Research and the IMDEA Software Institute in software science and technology. The new Joint Research Center sets the ground for a long-term collaboration aiming to advance the science and technology which will allow the cost-effective development of high-quality software products.

Among other relevant members of the public administration, industry, and the software research community, the opening was chaired by Carles Grau, Public Sector Director at Microsoft Spain; Rocio Albert López-Ibor, General Director for Universities and Research, Regional Ministry for Education; Manuel Hermenegildo, Director of the IMDEA Software Institute; Judith Bishop, Director of Computer Science at Microsoft Research and Mr. Jaime Puente, Director for Latin America at Microsoft Research.

More information at:

Media links:

MSR and IMDEA SW Researchers Present Four Joint Papers in Top-Ranked Conference

admin — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 11:44:02 +0000

Four joint papers by Microsoft Research and IMDEA Software Institute researchers were presented at the 41st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2014), a top-ranked conference in the area of programming languages and systems.

IMDEA Software faculty members Gilles Barthe and Pierre Yves Strub and Microsoft Research members Cédric Fournet, Nikhil Swamy and Santiago Zanella-Béguelin, have a paper on probabilistic relational verification for cryptographic implementations, together with Benjamin Grégoire (INRIA).
Another paper by Pierre Yves Strub (IMDEA Software) and Gavin Bierman, Juan Chen, Cédric Fournet and Nikhil Swamy (Microsoft Research), is on gradual typing securely embedded in JavaScript, with Karthikeyan Bhargavan (INRIA) and Aseem Rastogi (University of Maryland and Microsoft Research).
IMDEA Software faculty member Alexey Gotsman and Sebastian Burckhardt (Microsoft Research), have a paper on specification, verification and optimality of replicated data types, with Hongseok Yang (University of Oxford) and Marek Zawirski (INRIA and UPMC-LIP6).
IMDEA Software researcher Ilya Sergey with Dimitrios Vytiniotis and Simon Peyton Jones (Microsoft Research) have a paper on theory and practice of higher-order cardinality analysis.

These four papers are among 51 papers selected for publication out of 220 submissions to the conference.