Philip Offtermatt

I am a Ph.D. student at the Université de Sherbrooke and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken, under co-supervision by Michael Blondin and Filip Mazowiecki.

My current research focus is on formal verification, particularly of infinite-state systems. The overarching goal is to enable the development of more robust systems. For example, verification can help developers ensure a system meets specifications before, during, and after deployment, even if these specifications are hard to check manually or by testing. In particular, I work on making hard verification problems easier by finding and using approximations to solve them.

Personally, I also have interests in the Internet-of-Things and artificial intelligence.

I got my Bachelor’s (2018) and Master’s (2019) in Informatics from the Technical University of Munich, and I was part of the PaVeS research group as a student assistant. My master’s thesis was supervised by Christoph Welzel.

news

Aug 2, 2022 At the TLA+ conference, I’ll be presenting work I did during my internship at Informal Systems on enabling the Apalache model checker to reason about temporal properties beyond safety. See the abstract.
Jun 30, 2022 A paper was accepted at LICS 2022: The complexity of soundness in workflow nets (with Michael Blondin and Filip Mazowiecki). The preprint is on arXiv.
Jun 30, 2022 A paper was accepted at CAV 2022: Verifying generalised and structural soundness of workflow nets via relaxations (with Michael Blondin and Filip Mazowiecki). The preprint is on arXiv.
Oct 8, 2021 I am attending VTSA21 and made a poster about my work for the occasion: Verification bird poster
Apr 2, 2021 A paper was accepted at LICS 2021: Continuous One Counter Automata (with Michael Blondin, Tim Leys, Filip Mazowiecki and Guillermo Alberto Perez). The preprint is on arXiv.