On, September 15, 2022, Andrey Kofnov (Faculty of Mathematics TU Wien, SecInt Doctoral College), Marcel Moosbrugger (TU Wien Informatics, SecInt Doctoral College), Miroslav Stankovic (TU Wien Informatics, LogiCS Doctoral College), Efstathia Bura (Faculty of Mathematics TU Wien, SecInt Doctoral College) and Ezio Bartocci (TU Wien Informatics, SecInt Doctoral College and LogiCS Doctoral College) were awarded the Best Paper Award at the 19th International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems (QEST 2022) held in Warsaw (Poland). The prize money of 1000 Euro offered by Springer recognizes their achievement.

In their paper “Moment-based Invariants for Probabilistic Loops with Non-polynomial Assignments” they combine the theory of polynomial chaos expansion with automatic moment-based invariant generation to analyze, as closed-form expressions, the statistical moments of random variables’ distributions generated by probabilistic programs with non-polynomial assignments. An example of such programs is the Taylor rule, used by central banks to set monetary policy by raising or lowering their target for the federal funds rate. They have also applied their method to analyze the probabilistic behavior of cyber-physical systems (2D Robotic Arm, Rimless Wheel Walker, Turning vehicle) modeled as probabilistic programs. This paper is the result of an intensive and productive inter-faculty and inter-disciplinary collaboration between TU Wien Informatics, Mathematics, and Geoinformation (Applied Statistics). This collaboration was possible also thanks to the Doctoral College SecInt.

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