Computer scientist Dr Marieke Huisman has been awarded the Netherlands Prize for ICT Research 2013. Huisman, of the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT) at the University of Twente, has conducted research on the reliability and accuracy of concurrent software and recently received prize money worth €50,000.
Most modern computers and smart phones run concurrent software which makes the software faster. While this is efficient, the different processes can interfere with each other and cause computers to crash, malfunction or display incorrect results. Huisman's research focuses on the use of logic-based reasoning to reduce those bugs.
"Computer software is used in many key areas like hospitals, on-board airplanes or in traffic. Bugs in software can have major consequences, and may even cost lives. "My research helps to detect and eliminate these bugs", according to Huisman. The €50,000 can be freely dedicated to ICT research and Huisman plans to expand her research into other programming languages, particularly functional languages.
About the Netherlands Prize for IT Research
The Netherlands Prize for ICT research is a unique prize for a scientist who conducts innovative research or is responsible for a scientific breakthrough in ICT. The prize is an initiative of the ICT Research Platform Netherlands (IPN) and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in collaboration with the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW).
About Marieke Huisman
Dr Marieke Huisman works as an associate professor in the Formal Methods and Tools Group on the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS). She obtained her PhD in 2001 from the Computing Science Institute of the University of Nijmegen with her thesis Java program verification in Higher-order logic with PVS and Isabelle. Since then, she has worked as a researcher at INRIA in France (2000-2008) and as an assistant professor at the University of Twente (2008-2011). Huisman has won several prestigious grants, such as an ERC Starting Grant for her project "Vercors: Verification of Concurrent Data Structures" and a NWO Free Competition grant for her research project 'SlaLoM: Security by Logic for Multithreaded applications'.
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