Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Prologue.Several circumstances contributed to the exciting and educative time that I enjoyed as PhD in the Formal Methods and Tool group at the University of Twente.I would like to mention a few to provide some more context and meaning to the subsequent thank yous.As a Master student in the Software Engineering group, I developed an appetite for doing academic research.At that time, sifting through stacks of papers to find an optimal solution to the problem at hand, or simply solving a hard problem like a puzzle, each time felt like a welcome mental exercise, even though communicating the results still presented a difficult and often painful undertaking for me.I was therefore happy that others still considered me a suitable PhD candidate.It was Mariëlle Stoelinga who invited me to apply for a job offer in the Formal Methods and Tools group.I saw it as an excellent opportunity to sharpen my skills and also learn at least something about the art of presenting and lecturing.Knowing little of the field of formal methods, I went to the job interview slightly intimidated.That made it quite exiting to learn that Jaco van de Pol and Michael Weber agreed to take me under their wings and offer me the job as PhD on the project "Multi-Core Model Checking".At that time, I was mainly preoccupied on becoming familiar with the field of formal methods, hence what I did not expect then, was that this job would offer such an enriching experience, for both my professional and personal life.Before I could get started however, it was first decided by colleague Mark Timmer that I needed a holiday to rest from the hard work on my Master's thesis.Actually, I agreed, and luckily Jaco and Michael as well.This short holiday ensured that my first working day as a PhD coincided with the Dutch Model Checking Day 2009 (DMCD) organized that year by Jaco and Michael at the University of Twente.Attending the symposium certainly gave an inspiring start to my career.v Acknowledgments Lucky enough to land in the same office as my daily supervisor Michael and direct colleague Stefan Blom, I was in an excellent position to learn the craft of the trade.I hope this thesis is indeed proof that I actually learned something; that your efforts were not in vain.For me, being able to work in the stimulating environment that the FMT group provided was already very rewarding.Thank yous.Jaco, in your role as promotor and later also daily supervisor, you had the most influence in shaping my academic skills, for which I thank you.Our weekly meetings helped a lot to improve the precision of this and other works.Your enthusiasm to work on new parallel algorithms was quite infectious, and also in this area I learned a lot from your rigorous mathematical analysis and insights.I was most impressed by the amount of papers, theses, conference submissions and other work you always manage to take home and review.Even at late deadlines, you helped by proofreading the last revisions in our submission, always resulting in useful comments and suggestions, which I am certain improved our standing with the reviewers.Although somehow we never managed to avoid these scheduling issues, I did learn from the feedback.Indeed, when we both handed in our reviews of the same paper for a conference in 2014, you remarked that our reviews were similar and congratulated yourself on 'raising' me well.Quite a compliment!Michael, thank you for taking me on and being my daily supervisor in those first years.You always provided an excellent overview of the state-of-art in the field of model checking and managed to point me to the interesting open problems.When I received your comments on this thesis, including the discussion of future work, I was reminded of those first years when our discussions often led to so many new ideas.Both you and Jaco gave me a lot of freedom to work out my own plans and pursue my own interests, making the project more interesting but also more challenging.Your way with language was funny (with pun often intended), but was also helpful for writing those early papers together.I also admired your skills in understanding (to a point) something as complex and extensive as the GNU build system, but also the whole process that comes with maintaining a large piece of software.Unfortunately, I cannot say that I learned the craft entirely, but I still hope that the latest LTSmin 2.0 release lives up to your standards.Judging from your feedback on this thesis, the same probably holds for my mastery of the English language, though I should note that currently as an American citizen, you hold an advantage.(On that subject, Michael, I understood that you had to abandon your PhD student in order to relocate with your family to the United States, although I have some difficulty with the fact that you also stole an excellent student and potential colleague, namely Freark, to work for you over there.)I also thank the committee members for agreeing to participate in my PhD comvi together.I also valued your insights in many organizational structures, life and formal methods.When you manage to take a night off from being a busy family man, I always could count on you for taking me up on the offer for a next round of drinks.Mark, sorry I made you my go-to guy for so many things, but you know them so well as evidenced by your results as a PhD and school teacher.I very much enjoyed our joint trip together with my dear Laura through the United States' West Coast.You and Arnd were the necessary condition for the four of us to be able to see so many amazing things in such a short time.I wish you and Thijs the best of luck with the adoption.I am sure your child will have the best examples as parents.Tom, you conveniently may not have remembered that we already worked together on a Physics subject, but I do.I was therefore a pleasantly surprised when Jaco informed me that you were this guy in his class, who toke up the work to parallelize BDDs all by himself.I am happy to have been able to work with you on this subject.
Author: Alfons Laarman
Language: English
Subfield: Computational Theory and Mathematics
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W203992939