HomeNewsERC Starting Grant for CTIT researcher Marieke Huisman

ERC Starting Grant for CTIT researcher Marieke Huisman

Marieke Huisman of the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT) at the University of Twente has won a European Research Council Starting Grant of
€1.3 million. She will use the prestigious individual grant to develop new technology that will help prevent errors in the development of software. She will recruit two trainee research assistants and two postdoctoral researchers for the project over the next five years.

Computers are becoming ever faster and ever more powerful, but it appears that the limits of this development are gradually being reached. It is no longer possible to make processors work any faster, so multi-core processors are increasingly being used. These are processors with a number of cores that can carry out calculations simultaneously. To make optimum use of a multi-core processor, the software that runs on it has to define the calculations that can be carried out in parallel. A major problem with this type of software is that it is highly susceptible to errors: all possible interactions between the calculations have to be examined to make sure a program is working correctly.

MULTI-THREADED PROGRAMMING

To ensure that multi-core processors work properly, the program that is being worked in also has to be multi-threaded. If your software is multi-threaded, then your program can do a number of tasks at the same time, for example processing an incoming message and simultaneously locating information in a database.

The difficulty of multi-threaded programming is highlighted when a program is carrying out various calculations at the same time and one outcome also has to be used in another calculation. The risk is that the required value has not yet been calculated, but the calculation continues anyway. Another danger is if two cores attempt to make changes to the same memory location. The program can then produce all kinds of unexpected values, causing it to crash.

SMART MATHS

Huisman now plans to use her grant to develop smart techniques using mathematical models that avoid all possibility of error. This has already been partly achieved for the JAVA programming language, but Huisman aims to extend the technique further and make it applicable to other similar programming languages.

ERC STARTING GRANT

The European Research Council Starting Grant is a prestigious individual European award. The criteria for its award include not only the research proposal submitted, but also the quality of the researcher and his or her earlier research work. Marieke Huisman plans to use this grant to employ two trainee research assistants and two postdoctoral researchers for her study.

CV

Marieke Huisman is a researcher at the Formal Methods and Tools research group of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science and the CTIT research institute of the University of Twente. Since 2008 she has been working at the University of Twente in a so-called 'tenure track'. Before this she carried out research at various institutes, including a French research institute and at the Radboud University in Nijmegen.