First of all, congratulations on your new status as tenured Faculty. What does reaching this career milestone mean to you?
The path to a permanent position in academic research (and teaching) offers little job security and depends on a lot of chance. My own path has been pretty rocky in the last few years, so I’m all the more pleased that the hard work has paid off for my team and me under these difficult circumstances. Being recommended for tenure by colleagues both inside and outside of CISPA felt like a great vote of confidence.
What makes working at CISPA special for you?
What impresses me about CISPA, compared with the universities and research institutes I’ve become more familiar with, is the strong sense of community and mutual support among colleagues. Anyone planning a new research project or who has a question—whether scientific or more general—can always count on valuable feedback and support. In addition, it has been fantastic to witness CISPA’s growth: From a few dozen staff members who almost all knew each other by name, to its current status as a world-leading research institute in our field.
You work in the field of formal verification. What were the topics that have occupied you during your tenure-track phase?
My group focuses primarily on formal models of distributed systems, for example protocols for distributed computation in the cloud. In this area we developed new methods for obtaining provably correct systems that, for the first time, combine three important aspects: First, we can guarantee correctness properties regardless of the number of components in the system; second, these guarantees hold even in the presence of (separately modeled) faults or attackers; and third, the proof methods are modular, so we can apply them to increasingly complex systems.
Recently we have also been working on automatically learning formal models from observations of the communication within a distributed system. Here we developed the first approach that can automatically learn protocols of systems with as many components as desired.
What is your greatest achievement at CISPA, or which moment are you most proud of?
For me there isn't just one moment or achievement. One very special moment was definitely the successful PhD defense of my first doctoral student. In general, I feel most proud of how I've been able to help the members of my team individually on their own paths.
What do you want to focus on in your research over the next few years?
So far our work has been heavily focused on theoretical aspects, even though we've implemented prototypes from time to time to demonstrate our methods. Theoretical work will of course continue, but over the next few years I also want to focus on developing mature tools for other researchers—and maybe for a broader audience. Our techniques can benefit both those who design new protocols for distributed systems in theory and those who later implement them in real hardware and software. That will require a major investment in development work on our side, which we now intend to undertake.
Will anything about your work change now that you’re tenured?
Yes—I think becoming tenured does bring a substantive change. During the tenure track you can only take on projects you are fairly sure will pay off within 2–3 years. With the job security that tenured provides, I’m now discussing project ideas with my team that are far more ambitious and that in some cases extend well beyond that time horizon. You could say that now the real work on CISPA’s mission begins: Tackling the truly big challenges in cybersecurity.
Thank you for the interview, Swen.
