Prof. Éric Tanter is one of the 10 winners of Facebook Research's global competition

One of the great scientific and technological challenges in computing today is maintaining the security, accuracy, and stability of the large digital information systems on which society increasingly depends, including services, social networks, and many others.

These systems generate and process enormous volumes of data, making it even more complex to ensure their optimal and secure operation for all users.

To address these challenges, Facebook Research issued an international call to all scientists and universities researching both formal and applied methods for testing and verifying computer systems to participate in the Facebook Testing and Verification Research Awards competition.

The winners were recently announced. Out of nearly 150 proposals received, 10 were selected as winners, including the one submitted by Éric Tanter, professor of Computer Science at the University of Chile and researcher at Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data, together with Jonathan Aldrich and Joshua Sunshine, both from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States.

Tanter, who is currently at the French National Institute for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (Inria) in France, points out that the project presented is part of the research he has been conducting over the last decade, which seeks to make software verification techniques more accessible in order to encourage their progressive adoption in the development of computer systems.

Facebook Research will award ten prizes of US$50,000 to the winning research teams. According to Mark Harman, Engineering Manager at Facebook Infrastructure, the purpose of the competition was to find proposals that were "challenging and excellent from a scientific standpoint, but also had the potential to be used on the scale we typically see in the technology sector in general."

The idea behind the challenges posed by Facebook Research, Éric Tanter points out, is that the proposals and their progress should be openly accessible to the entire developer ecosystem, from organizations to individuals, so that they can use them to improve the robustness of their own systems.