Research interests
The MiST research group is focused on different aspects of
programming languages, combining both theoretical developments and
practical applications. You can find below a summary of our main
research interests:
- Declarative formalisms, which are characterized by their high level of abstraction.
They function both as specification languages and, also, as programming languages.
We specifically focus on term rewriting, logic programming (e.g., Prolog), functional
programming (e.g., Haskell), and the actor model (e.g., Erlang).
- Hybrid artificial intelligence. We focus on combining declarative, rule-based formalisms
(e.g., logic programming or term rewriting) for knowledge representation and reasoning with
probabilities (learned from data) to manage uncertainty. The resulting probabilistic models are
formally verifiable, and both the models and their predictions are interpretable and explainable.
- Reversible computation. Beyond its theoretical interest, reversible computation is a
fundamental concept relevant to diverse areas such as bidirectional program transformation and
quantum computing. Furthermore, it offers a theoretical path to ultra-low-power systems by avoiding
the energy cost associated with erasing information (going beyond the so-called Landauer's principle).
In this context, we have defined a reversible semantics for the message-passing concurrent language
Erlang to design a causally consistent reversible debugger (CauDEr) and improve fault tolerance.
- Software verification, testing and debugging. Ensuring the reliability of critical software
is a major challenge. Our group explores various approaches, including formal verification
(e.g., model checking) and software testing (e.g., concolic testing). As mentioned above, we also
investigate reversible debugging for message-passing concurrent programming languages.
- Static analysis and program transformation techniques. These techniques are used to compute
program properties and improve efficiency, readability, and maintainability. Crucially, they rely
on a rigorous mathematical foundation, allowing us to formally prove their correctness and other
key properties.
- Web information retrieval. Extracting information from the web is useful for humans.
For instance, to extract the news from a newspaper by removing the boilerplate content such as
advertisements, templates, banners, etc.). But it is also useful for many automated processes
such as the indexing of webpages by only considering the words that appear in the main content.
Another interesting example is detecting the template of a website to speed up the processing
of its webpages.
Current members
Former members
Some (past and present) collaborators
Research Projects
The MiST research group is currently
involved in the following R+D projects:
- SAFER (4 years,
from June, 2020 to May, 2024) Funded
by EU (FEDER) and the Spanish MCI/AEI,
grant PID2019-104735RB-C41.
Analysis and Validation of Software and Web Resources
In collaboration with the
Babel,
Dec-Tau,
Smile,
and
ISG
groups.
- MERINET (4 years,
from Jan 1, 2017 to Dec 31, 2020) Funded
by Spanish MINECO/AEI and EU (FEDER),
grant TIN2016-76843-C4-1-R.
Rigorous Methods for the Future
Internet
In collaboration with the Dec-Tau
and Smile
groups.
- TAILOR (Foundations of Trustworthy AI - Integrating Reasoning, Learning and Optimization). ICT-48 H2020-RIA-952215 (from 2020 to 2023).
- COST
action IC1405 on Reversible
Computation - Extending Horizons of
Computing (from 2015 to 2019).
- PROMETEO/2019/098 DeepTrust: Deep Logic Technology for Software Trustworthiness (Excellence Research Group GV, 2019-2022)
- PROMETEOII/2015/013 SmartLogic:
Tecnologías Lógicas para
la Seguridad, Modelado, Análisis y Rendimiento del software
Software
You can check the group's
repository here. Some
additional tools can be found in the personal
pages of the members of the group.
