The winners of the “Amazon Research Awards” (ARA), have been announced last June the 3rd, a program that supports research at academic institutions and non-profit organizations in areas that align with their mission to advance customer-obsessed science.
In the list of 70 winners, representing 44 universities in 10 countries, we find Alexandra Mendes, Assistant Professor at DEI, the winner in the Automated Reasoning area, for her proposal “Overcoming Barriers to the Adoption of Verification-Aware Languages“. This edition marks the first time the award has been granted to Portuguese researchers based in Portugal.
The Professor will focus her work on identifying and resolving obstacles to the adoption of programming languages with support for formal verification, in particular Dafny, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The aim is to promote the usability and adoption of formal verification tools among software developers.
The ARAs are highly competitive, with proposals evaluated by Amazon scientists according to the quality of their scientific content and their potential impact on the research community and society. Current and past winners include researchers from other leading institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, Stanford and Yale.
All the information about this latest edition of the ARA (Fall 2024) can be found here.