Prof. Éric Tanter is one of 10 winners of Facebook Research global contest

One of the great scientific and technological challenges in computer science today is to maintain the security, correctness, and stability of the large digital information systems on which society increasingly depends, ranging from services to social networks, among many others.

These systems generate and process gigantic volumes of data, so ensuring their optimal and secure operation for all users becomes even more complex.

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 almost 150 proposals received, 10 were the winners, including the one submitted by Éric Tanter, full professor of Computer Science at the University of Chile and researcher at the 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, says that the project presented is part of the research he has been conducting for the last decade, which seeks to make software verification techniques more accessible 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 on a scientific level, but that also have the potential to be used on the scale that we tend to see in the technology sector in general".

The idea behind the challenges posed by Facebook Research, says Éric Tanter, is that the proposals and their advances should be open access to the entire ecosystem of developers, from organizations to individuals, so that they can use them to improve the robustness of their own systems.