Photo grid shows the spring 2021 ARA recipients, from top left to right, Haniel Barbosa, Clark Barrett, Yuriy Brun, Adam Chlipala, Jyotirmoy Deshmukh, Isil Dillig, Parasara Sridhar Duggirala, Philippa Gardner, Jan Hoffmann, Falk Howar, Anthony Lin, Magnus Madsen, Kuldeep S. Meel, Eric Mercer, Peter Müller, Suha Orhun Mutluergil, Jason Nieh, Gennaro Parlato, Ruzica Piskac, Roopsha Samanta, Sanjit Seshia, Alexander Summers, Josef Urban, Diyi Yang, Qirun Zhang, and Danyang Zhuo.
The spring 2021 recipients are, from top left to right, Haniel Barbosa, Clark Barrett, Yuriy Brun, Adam Chlipala, Jyotirmoy Deshmukh, Isil Dillig, Parasara Sridhar Duggirala, Philippa Gardner, Jan Hoffmann, Falk Howar, Anthony Lin, Magnus Madsen, Kuldeep S. Meel, Eric Mercer, Peter Müller, Suha Orhun Mutluergil, Jason Nieh, Gennaro Parlato, Ruzica Piskac, Roopsha Samanta, Sanjit Seshia, Alexander Summers, Josef Urban, Diyi Yang, Qirun Zhang, and Danyang Zhuo.

Spring 2021 Amazon Research Awards recipients announced

The 26 awardees represent 25 universities in 11 countries. Recipients have access to more than 250 Amazon public datasets, and can utilize AWS AI/ML services and tools.

In July 2021, Amazon notified applicants that they were recipients of the Spring 2021 Amazon Research Awards, a program that provides unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating research topics across a number of disciplines.

Today, we’re publicly announcing the 26 award recipients who represent 25 universities in 11 countries. Each award is intended to support the work of one to two graduate students or postdoctoral students for one year, under the supervision of a faculty member.

ARA is funding awards under two call for proposals: Alexa Fairness in AI and AWS Automated Reasoning. Proposals were reviewed for the quality of their scientific content, their creativity, and their potential to impact both the research community, and society more generally. Theoretical advances, creative new ideas, and practical applications were all considered.

Recipients have access to more than 250 Amazon public datasets, and can utilize AWS AI/ML services and tools through their AWS Promotional Credits. Recipients also are assigned an Amazon research contact who offers consultation and advice along with opportunities to participate in Amazon events and training sessions.

Additionally, Amazon encourages the publication of research results, presentations of research at Amazon offices worldwide, and the release of related code under open-source licenses.

"Research in automated reasoning is deeply intertwined with a broad range of other research areas, touching machine learning, hardware and software engineering, robotics, and life sciences," said Daniel Kroening, senior principal scientist for the Automated Reasoning Group. "The 2021 Amazon Research Awards reflect this breadth, and the interdisciplinary nature of research that is necessary to take computing one step closer to that magic spark that drives human reasoning."

ARA funds proposals up to four times a year in a variety of research areas. Applicants are encouraged to visit the ARA call for proposals page for more information or send an email to be notified of future open calls.

Below is the list of Spring 2021 award recipients, presented in alphabetical order.

Recipient

University

Research title

Haniel Barbosa

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Efficient Checking and Reconstruction of SMT Proofs

Clark Barrett

Stanford University

HydraScale: Solving SMT Queries in the Serverless Cloud

Yuriy Brun

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Formal Verification via Language-Modeling-Based Proof Synthesis

Adam Chlipala

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Correct-by-Construction IoT Systems and Cloud Servers

Jyotirmoy Deshmukh

University of Southern California

Systematic Testing and Invariant Synthesis for Concurrent Programs using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Isil Dillig

The University of Texas at Austin

Automated Code Modernization and Migration

Parasara Sridhar Duggirala

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Model Checking For Counterexamples

Philippa Gardner

Imperial College London

A Multi-language Platform for Symbolic Testing and Verification

Jan Hoffmann

Carnegie Mellon University

Automatic Static Resource Analysis for Serverless Computing

Falk Howar

Technical University of Dortmund

Scaling Dynamic Symbolic Execution for Java

Anthony Lin

University of Kaiserslautern

Certified Solvers and Proof Checkers forString Constraints

Magnus Madsen

Aarhus University

Type Inference with Boolean Unification

Kuldeep S. Meel

National University of Singapore

GPU-Enabled Parallel SAT Solving

Eric Mercer

Brigham Young University

Symbolic Execution for Generating Java Tests from Dafny Models

Peter Müller

ETH Zurich

Verification of Rust Programs against TLA+ Specifications

Suha Orhun Mutluergil

Sabanci University

Linearizability Checking Via Symbolic Reasoning

Jason Nieh

Columbia University

Verifying System Software on an Arm Multiprocessor Hardware Model

Gennaro Parlato

University of Molise

Program Analysis in the Clouds (PAC): A Distributed Symbolic Algorithm to Scale Up Bug-finding in Concurrent Programs

Ruzica Piskac

Yale University

Counterexample-Guided Inference of Modular Specifications

Roopsha Samanta

Purdue University, West Lafayette

Automated and Modular Parameterized Verification of Distributed Systems (3225)

Sanjit Seshia

University of California, Berkeley

Scalable Verification of Secure Distributed Services through Synthesis and Learning

Alexander Summers

The University of British Columbia

Enriched Type and Memory Encodings for Modular Rust Verification

Josef Urban

Czech Technical University in Prague

Combining Neural and Symbolic Methods in Theorem Proving

Diyi Yang

Georgia Institute of Technology

Towards Dialect-Robust and Inclusive Natural Language Understanding

Qirun Zhang

Georgia Institute of Technology

Software Model Checking via Interleaved Dyck-Reachability

Danyang Zhuo

Duke University

Push-Button Verification of Software Middleboxes

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