In February 2017, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded Marieke Huisman a VICI grant worth 1.5 million euros. Marieke Huisman is Professor of Software Reliability at the Digital Society Institute (DSI). She develops new techniques to ensure that, even as it becomes increasingly complex, software remains reliable.
Reliable software
The VICI grant will fund Prof. Marieke Huisman's research into reliable software for a period of five years. Creating reliable software remains a major challenge. Programming involves writing instructions that can be ‘understood’ by a computer. These instructions were traditionally carried out in sequence, one by one. Nowadays, it is quite common for computers to perform several series of instructions simultaneously. This makes the process more complex, which in turn increases the risk of errors or problems. Marieke Huisman develops new techniques for checking such complex pieces of programming work for instructions that will cause errors or conflicts, well before users attempt to run these instructions in their production environments. This way you can check that the program’s code works flawlessly, before you start running it at the target destination. Marieke Huisman has already received financial support, including a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).
Program Verification and System Validation
The Master’s programme in Computer Science, and especially the Software Technology specialization, teaches you how to write reliable software. As you progress through this programme, you will acquire the skills needed to create top-quality software with rock-solid foundations. How do you go about designing, constructing and validating software like this? How can you check whether the implemented product really works? At the University of Twente you are taught efficient methods for developing software that really works well and cuts costs. As part of the Master’s programme in Computer Science, Marieke Huisman is the programme mentor for Software Technology and teaches two subjects, Program Verification and System Validation.