Pepe Vila and Joaquín Arias, two former PhD students of the IMDEA Software Institute, have won the 2019-2020 Outstanding Thesis Award granted by the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM).

Pepe Vila’s thesis, “Learning Secrets and Models from Execution Time”, directed by Dr. Boris Köpf, studies problems arising in computer systems that leak information through execution time by focusing on how such leaks can be used to learn secrets - from confidential computations - or models - from the underlying components - providing examples that violate prior assumptions about the security of systems or about the limits of an attacker. The results of his thesis evidence that better models and methods are needed to evaluate both the security of computer systems and measures against cyberattacks.

Dr. Manuel Carro, director of the Institute, supervised Joaquín Arias’ thesis: “Advanced Evaluation Techniques for (Non)-Monotonic Reasoning Using Rules with Constraints”. Joaquín’s thesis contributes to the state of the art of both, Tabled Constraint Logic Programming (TCLP) and Contraint Answer Set Programming (CASP). His results envision advantages on several fronts: complex queries and non-trivial reasoning can be easier to express thanks to the higher-level of logic programming and constraints; fewer computations are needed thanks to the automatic reuse of previous inferences; queries and associated actions (if any) can be programmed using the same formalism. The use of the resulting tools, Mod TCLP and s(CASP), makes it easier translation of problem requirements into code and minimizes the amount of re-engineering needed to comply with the requirements when they change.