On March 12, Marcel Moosbrugger received his doctorate sub auspiciis, a recognition for exceptional academic achievements, under the auspices of the Federal President of the Republic of Austria and the rectorate of TU Wien. Federal President Dr. Alexander Van der Bellen will award Marcel Moosbrugger the Ring of Honor of the Republic of Austria in his offices on Monday, March 14. Marcel Moosbrugger’s Doctoral Thesis “Automated Analysis of Probabilistic Loops” was supervised by Laura Kovács and co-supervised by Ezio Bartocci.

Marcel Moosbrugger graduated as a Bachelor with Honors from TU Wien Informatics in 2019, and he he was a Distinguished Young Alumn Award winner in 2020. He received his Master’s Degree in 2020, and he won the Diploma Thesis Award of the City of Vienna in 2021. He was also nominated for the Austrian Master Thesis Prize and the Christiana Hörbiger Prize. During his studies, he supported eduLAB’s “Abenteuer Informatik” project, and he is currently working as an External Research Engineer at Huawei.

Dr. Moosbrugger’s Doctoral Thesis addresses challenges and advancements in the automated analysis of probabilistic loops. Software systems are essential in modern life, and ensuring their correctness is just as important, especially in safety-critical environments. To do just that, the code needs to be inspected and validated, but manual code inspection is slow and error-prone, making automated program analysis necessary. This involves techniques to automatically infer properties of programs, helping to detect bugs and security issues and ensure correctness. Loops are fundamental to most programs, enabling repetitive tasks. However, they introduce challenges in analysis due to undecidability and uncomputability. Despite these challenges, program analysis continues to evolve, using semi-algorithms and approximations to work around undecidability. Adding probabilistic elements, like random decisions in programs, makes analysis even harder, especially for termination. Dr. Moosbrugger’s thesis addresses these difficulties by developing automated methods to analyze probabilistic loops, a key area of probabilistic program analysis.

Congratulations to Marcel Moosbrugger for this extraordinary achievement!

Learn more about Marcel and his research in our #5QW Interview Series.