Over the next five years, Alexandra Silva will be working at University College London to come up with new programming, logic and verification ideas in computer network programming. The grant from the European Research Council (ERC) will provide the necessary means to form a research team composed of two post-doctoral researchers and two PhD students.

“The world is increasingly connected and the networks are more and more complex. So what we want to do in the long term is to make people’s daily tasks simpler and to make sure that the systems they use are reliable”, the researcher explains.

The European Research Council annually chooses research projects of excellence in any scientific field, as long as the research is developed in a European institution, and as long as the projects are innovative in the science and technology fields.

It is important to remember that in 2013 the HASLab researcher won the IBM Science Award, which was awarded for the first time to a woman. In her work, titled “Kleene Coalgebra”, she addressed one of the greatest results of Computer Science – the Kleene theorem. As part of this work, Alexandra Silva created strict specification languages to describe/prescribe and verify the behaviour of several computing models.

The 31 year old researcher completed her degree in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2006 at the University of Minho and a PhD “cum laude” – a distinction awarded in only 5% of the cases – at the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Photo credits: Website Alexandra Silva

INESC TEC, November 2015