Chair News

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The CC Chair congratulates Marcus Rossel for receiving the N.-J. Lehmann-Stiftung award for his “outstanding thesis in Computer Science with theoretical focus”. In his thesis, “An Equality Saturation Tactic for Lean”, Marcus built a tactic for the Lean theorem prover that allows mathematicians, computer scientists and others to reason about equations in a much more efficient way. It automates away tasks that can range from tedious to extremely difficult, and lets users focus on the interesting parts of the proof. This work wouldn’t have been possible without the supervision of Andres Goens, a previous PhD student of the CC Chair, who is now a professor in the University of Amsterdam. Marcus is a postgraduate researcher, working on Verified System Design Automation (VerSA) at the Barkhausen Institute in Dresden. He received the award remotely, while attending PLDI’25 in Seoul South Korea, one of top conferences in the field, where he presented a follow-up of his thesis work.

 

We also congratulate Max Kurze for receiving “3m5 award for an outstanding thesis in Computer Science”. Max is currently pursuing a PhD at the Verified System Design Automation (VerSA) group at the Barkhausen Institute in Dresden. In his thesis, “A Framework for Modular and Compositional Formal Reasoning in Koika”, Max devised a novel typed parsing and implemented a Hoare logic reasoning framework, extending Kôika’s semantics to scale provably correct designs towards trustworthy computing systems. This thesis was also supervised by a previous PhD student of the CC Chair, Sebastian Ertel, who leads the VerSA as research group leader at the Barkhausen Institute in Dresden. This is awesome work and we look forward to seeing how Max will build on it during his PhD. 

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Continuing with the tradition, the CC chair participated in the REWE Team Challenge, a 5K run through downtown Dresden. This year, our chair was represented by (almost) three teams: Run-time Errors, consisting Steffen Märcker, Siddharth Gupta, Christian Menard and David Silbermann (who missed the run); Byte Me Runners, featuring Jeronimo Castrillon, Conny Okuma, John Konitzer and Mees Frensel; and Process run., a team with Nesrine Khouzami, Robin Ziemek (who missed the run), André Berthold and Tassilo Tanneberger. The weather made the run harder than usual. This impacted some of the individual times. More training will be needed for 2026, looking forward!

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The CC Chair congratulates Christian Menard for receiving the 2025 EDAA Dissertation award during the social event at the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE) in Lyon, France. His thesis, entitled, “Deterministic Reactive Programming for Cyber-physical Systems”, is available for download. We thank the EDAA and Ian O'Connor (Vice Chair, in the picture) for the recognition. During the same event, Prof. Castrillon gave a talk on “Compiler Support for Ferroelectric Compute-in-Memory Solutions (and beyond)” at the co-located workshop “Cross-stack Explorations of Ferroelectric-based Logic and Memory Solutions for At-Scale Compute Workloads”. 

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Hamid Farzaneh represented the CC Chair at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) 2025, held in Rotterdam, Netherlands, from March 30 to April 3, 2025. He presented our paper titled “CINM (Cinnamon): A Compilation Infrastructure for Heterogeneous Compute In-Memory and Compute Near-Memory Paradigms”. Cinnamon is an MLIR-based high-level compilation framework designed to improve the programmability of emerging in-/near-memory computing systems.

The conference gathered over 800 researchers and experts from academia and industry. The lively atmosphere and excellent weather in Rotterdam provided a great setting for exchanging ideas and connecting with the community.

Hamid also gave a talk at the 1st Workshop on Memory-Centric Computing Systems (MCCSys), co-located with ASPLOS. His talk, “High-level programming abstractions and compilation for near and in-memory computing,” covered CINM, the C4CAM compiler for CAM-based accelerators, and the Sherlock compiler for logic-in-memory systems.

 

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We congratulate Robert Khasanov for having successfully defended his PhD on March 25, 2025 on “Adaptive and Energy-efficient Management for Heterogeneous Multi-core Architectures”. Robert spent several years with us at the Chair for Compiler Construction where he greatly contributed to teaching and research, beyond the main topic of his dissertation. His work started in the context of the Collaborative Research Center "Highly Adaptive Energy-Efficient Computing" (HAEC). He made important contributions to methodologies to efficiently execute multiple applications, with publications in DATE, CASES, and ASP-DAC among others. We look forward to Robert's immediate future at the CC chair and to his further career steps!

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It was a very insightful week during this year’s cluster of conferences CC/CGO/HPCA/PPoPP in Las Vegas, USA, March 1 - March 5, 2023. The CC chair presented two papers at CC’25, both with tested and reproducible artefacts. In a collaboration with Fernando Magno Quintão Pereira, we developed "A Comparative Study on the Accuracy and the Speed of Static and Dynamic Program Classifiers”, which analyses the difference in accuracy of program classification when using different types of histograms as program representations (on x86 code or LLVM IR, with static or dynamic information), while testing for robustness to code obfuscation. Alex Brauckmann, a previous researcher at the CC Chair, presented "DFA-Net: A Compiler-Specific Neural Architecture for Robust Generalization in Data Flow Analyses”, which resulted from a collaboration with Meta AI and Mike O’Boyle. The paper describes a novel ML architecture that greatly outperforms standard ones in terms of generalization power for classical compiler analyses. 

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We are pleased to announce that the Chair for Compiler Construction was represented at the Dagstuhl Seminar 25091, titled "Tradeoffs in Reactive Systems Design," held from February 23 to 28, 2025, at Schloss Dagstuhl in Wadern, Germany.
The seminar focused on balancing conflicting requirements such as predictability, robustness, timeliness, adaptability, safety, security, and accessibility in reactive systems. Prof. Jerónimo Castrillón, one of the organizers, collaborated with Chadlia Jerad (University of Manouba, Tunisia), Edward A. Lee (University of California, Berkeley, USA), and Claire Pagetti (ONERA, Toulouse, France) to bring together experts from academia and industry.
Participants discussed the inherent tradeoffs in designing reactive systems—software systems that continuously interact with their environment, such as those used in autonomous vehicles and industrial automation. The seminar featured insightful talks, hands-on sessions, and tool demonstrations, fostering a collaborative environment to advance research in reactive systems design. It provided a unique platform for exchanging ideas, building partnerships, and driving innovation in the field.

 

 

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We congratulate Lars Schütze for having successfully defended his PhD on December 18th, 2024 on “Runtime Optimization of Contextual Role-oriented Programming Languages”. Lars has been several years at the Chair for Compiler Construction where he greatly contributed to teaching and research, beyond the main topic of his dissertation. His work started in the context of the “Role-based Software Infrastructures for continuous-context-sensitive Systems” (ROSI) which proposed role modeling and Role- Oriented Programming (ROP) as evolution of traditional Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). In his dissertation, Lars advances the area of compilers and virtual environments for efficient dynamic dispatch We are happy that Lars will stay as postdoctoral researcher at the CC chair and look forward to working with him on new research directions. 

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We are pleased to welcome Mees Frensel as the newest member of the CC Chair! Mees completed his master’s degree in Computer Engineering at TU Delft in 2024. His thesis, supervised by Prof. Zaid Al-Ars, focused on efficient, high-throughput nanopore DNA base-calling. He used model compression techniques, such as pruning, to reduce the size of an LSTM-based deep learning model without compromising accuracy. With expertise in DNA sequence analysis pipelines, Mees will be working on the genomICs project, led by Asif Khan, that aims to accelerate sequence analysis pipelines using emerging near-memory and in-memory computing architectures. We are excited to have Mees on board and look forward to working with him!

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The CC Chair was quite busy during the Embedded Systems Week (ESWeek) 2024, held in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, in the first week of October. On Sunday, Joao talked about emerging main memory simulation in the tutorial “Disruptive Memory Technologies: A Tutorial and Unified Simulation Framework” organised by Jian-Jia Chen, Joerg Henkel and Lokesh Siddhu. The simulation infrastructure code is publicly available. As program co-chair of the International Conference on Compilers, Architectures, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES), Prof. Castrillon had the privilege of presenting several awards during the ESWeek (test of time awards and best paper award). On Tuesday, Prof. Castrillon participated in the panel “The Embedded Systems and the Environmental Crisis” organised by Prof. Alex K. Jones and co-panelists Peipei Zhou, Steve Jackson, Daniel Andresen, and Sudeep Pasricha. CASES, and its sister conferences EMSOFT and CODES-ISSS, were a great success, with lively discussions during and between sessions. After closing the conferences, speakers and organisers of the workshop “Time-Centric Reactive Software (TCRS)” met for dinner at a typical BBQ restaurant. The TCRS workshop, co-organized by Prof. Hokeun Kim and Prof. Castrillon, had several interesting talks, including a paper by Shaokhai Lin on “Navigating Time and Energy Trade-offs in Reactive Heterogeneous Systems” and several other members of the CC Chair.