Agostino Cortesi obtained a PhD in applied mathematics and computer science from the University of Padua in 1993. After a postdoc at Brown University, he moved to Ca’ Foscari where he is now full professor of computer science. In the recent past he has been dean of the computer program and department head. He served as vice-rector for 8 years, dealing with quality assessment and institutional affairs.
He is currently head of the PhD programme in Computer Science at Ca’ Foscari. His main research interests concern programming language theory and static analysis techniques, with particular focus to security applications. He is also interested in studying the impact of ICT in different social and economic fields (from tourism to e-government to social sciences).
He has published over 150 articles in high-level international journals and international conference proceedings. Its current h-index is 20 according to Scopus and 28 according to Google Scholar.
He has been a member of numerous program committees for international conferences (eg SAS, VMCAI, CSF) and editorial committees of scientific journals (Computer Languages, Journal of Universal Computer Science). He is also co-director of the Springer book series “Services and Business Process Reengineering”. He is the coordinator of the EU Horizon2020 “Families_Share” project and has held the position of head of unit of the H2020 project EQUAL-IST and of the COST project “Eutypes”. He also directs the project MAE Italy-India 2017-19 “Formal Specification for Secured Software System” and the FIRST Covid-19 F2F project.
Pietro Ferrara is an expert of static analysis based on the abstract interpretation theory with a focus on the detection of security vulnerabilities and privacy leaks in object-oriented programs.
He joined the University of Venice in November 2019 as a tenure-track assistant professor, and he became associate professor in November 2022. Previously, from 2013 to 2019, he worked in industry gaining experience in delivering prototypes and commercial tools to customers filling the gap between scientific research and development, and delivery of software products, as well as technical and commercial presentation to customers, evaluation activities, and preparation of commercial and technical documentation.
In particular, he was the Head of Research and Development at JuliaSoft SRL (a spin-off of University of Verona focused on the static analysis of Java, Android, and .NET programs) from February 2016 to November 2019 where he supervised the development of the scientific core of an industrial static analyzer and the dissemination of its scientific results. He was a Research Staff Member in the group of Mobile Enterprise Software led by Marco Pistoia from July 2013 to December 2015, and a lecturer at ETH of Zurich in the Programming methodology group under the supervision of Peter Mueller from April 2009 to July 2013. He obtained my PhD degree in Computer Science from the Ecole Polytechnique of Paris and the Universita’ Ca’ Foscari of Venice on May, 22nd 2009. His PhD thesis advisors were Radhia Cousot and Agostino Cortesi. He defended his PhD thesis on May 22nd, 2009 at the Ecole Normale Superiore. In addition, he was an intern at Microsoft Research in Redmond in the PLA group from August 20th 2007 to November 9th 2007 under the supervision of Francesco Logozzo.
Paolo Falcarin is Associate Professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice since September 2021. He was awarded his PhD in Software Engineering in 2004, and MEng in Computer Engineering in 2000 from Polytechnic University of Turin (Italy), where he worked as a research associate before joining the University of East London in 2010 as Senior Lecturer and then Reader in Computer Science, where he led the Secure Software Engineering research group, and he was research coordinator for the REF2021 submission.
His research interests include Software Protection and Security, Software Engineering and Distributed Systems. He has been Principal Investigator for UEL in the European FP7 project ASPIRE (Advanced Software Protection: Integration Research and Exploitation) jointly with six companies and universities from across Europe. He has published more than 90 articles in international journals and conference proceedings; his current h-index is between 15 (on Scopus) and 23 (on Google Scholar).
Paolo spent a sabbatical research leave in 2012 at Centre for Research on Evolution Search and Testing (CREST) of Prof Mark Harman at UCL (University College London) and he was visiting researcher at ETH Zurich in 2003 in the group of Prof Gustavo Alonso. He has been visiting lecturer in China, at Tongji University Shanghai in 2009 and Hangzhou Dianzi university in 2016. Paolo is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK, a CSSLP certified security practitioner, an Oracle Certified Professional Java programmer, and an amateur chess player.
Stefano Calzavara is an associate professor in Computer Science at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italy. His research focuses on formal methods, computer security and their intersection, with a strong emphasis on web security. Stefano has published 40 papers on these topics at widely recognized international conferences and journals, including: IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, NDSS, USENIX Security, WWW, IEEE CSF, ESOP, ACM CSUR, ACM TOPLAS and ACMTWEB. Stefano’s research got two awards: the EA-TCS Best paper award at ETAPS 2013 and the 3rd place at the Applied Research competition of CSAW 2019.
Stefano was pleased to serve in the program committees of a number of scientific events, including USENIX Security, WWW, IEEE EuroS&P and IEEE CSF. Stefano was also the founder of the SecWeb workshop and co-chair of its 2020 edition.
Gianluca is a non-tenure track assistant professor. He worked for his postdoc and PhD in the ACADIA Center at the University of Venice under the supervision of Professor Agostino Cortesi.
From July 2018 to March 2019, he was a full-time researcher contributing to an international project among several Universities at Gachon Univerity (Seoul, South Korea) in the “A.I. and Smart Society Laboratory” under the guide of Professor Young-Im Cho.
He is mainly focused on security enhancements of cyber-physical systems (CPS) with particular emphasis on robotics and distributed connected devices, e.g. data distributed system (DDS), oneM2M.
His research aims to explore the trade-off between security and usability for Internet of Things (robotic) applications. Working on the widely used robotic middleware Robot Operating System (ROS), his work targets on providing automatic tools for security assessment and verification of the system. Currently, he focused on the mathematical verification of properties in a multi-agent distributed environment (e.g. smart cities scale) and privacy enforcement in dynamic networks.
Alvise Spanò got his PhD in Computer Science in 2013 at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, after nearly two decades spent in software development both as a junior professional and a senior in the industry. His experience ranges from software development to scientific research, with a strong emphasis on languages, compilers, type systems, software validation and correctness.
Besides his research topics of interest he got experience in several other areas: library design, code analyzers, code generators, concurrent client-server architectures, desktop as well as mobile applications, realtime graphics and audio. Among his major achievements in the open-source community we mention several award-winning Amiga demos at world-wide Demoscene Party Competitions back in the 1990s (The Party 96, Mekka-Symposium 97, Assembly 98); in 2002 the meta-programmable text generator Polygen; in 2007 the UML-to-code BOM and DAL generator [MGen, NetTiers]; plus a number of libraries freely released over the years, ranging from a tiny object broker for C++ [Aamon], automatic interoperability between OCaml and C++ [C2ML] and several standard library extensions for F# and OCaml.
He is now a full-position lecturer, researcher and developer at the the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. His academic interests brought to a number of publications and software prototypes in the fields of functional languages, static analysis and type-disciplined programming methodologies. In particular he is the author of Lw, a new general-purpose functional-first language with advanced features.
Maikel Lázaro Pérez Gort is currently a research fellow in Università Ca’ Foscari. He received the M.Sc. degree in applied informatics at Universidad Tecnológica de La Habana, Cuba, in 2010 under the supervision of Raúl Martinez Rodríguez; and the Ph.D degree in computer sciences at National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE) of Puebla, México, in 2020, under the supervision of Claudia Feregrino Uribe and Agostino Cortesi.
From 2006 to 2013 he was a full-time professor at Universidad Tecnológica de La Habana, and software developer in the project of Human Resource Management Systems (GREHU). He was also a part-time professor at Universidad Iberoamericana, Puebla, in Mexico.
In 2008 he was a visiting researcher at Department of Computer Science, University of Tampere, Finland; and in 2010 worked as a visiting professor at the University of Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela.
From 2014 to 2017 he worked on the project Watermark Algorithms for Secret Communications granted by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología. México. Also, from 2018 to 2020, he worked in the project Analysis and Design of Algorithms and Security Platforms for Internet of Things, granted by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología. México
His research interests are relational databases theory, information security and privacy, and data usability and authenticity.
Souvick Das is currently a research fellow in Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia. He received M.Sc. degree in computer science from West Bengal State University, India. He is a PhD candidate in University of Calcutta, under supervision of Prof. Nabendu Chaki, Dr. Novarun Deb and Prof. Agostino Cortesi. He will defend his PhD thesis, named “NLP Approaches towards Requirements Engineering for Incremental Software Development” in May 2023.
His research interest includes Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning, Requirements Engineering, IOT, and Microservices.
Luca Negrini is currently a Java and C# developer at JuliaSoft, where we develop the Julia static analyzer. His work at JuliaSoft goes beyond the simple software development: he is also part of the Scientific LAB, whose main focus is to bring the theoretical research on Static analysis in contact with the industrial ecosystem. This led to a vast number of publications (see here) and continues to bring contributions to the scientific community.
Luca started studying computer science in high school, continuing with both Bechelor’s and Master’s degree at the University of Verona. He got in touch with JuliaSoft during his Master’s thesis, and that was the place where he was interested in for Abstract Interpretation. He then joined JuliaSoft as a developer of the Julia static analyzer in April 2018.
Luca Negrini joined Ca’ Foscari University of Venice as a PhD student in Computer Science in October 2019, focusing on Static Analysis for the IoT ecosystem.
Zubair Ahmad received his master degree in Information and Communication Engineering from Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications Chongqing China. During his master degree, he did his research work on ‘Resource Allocation in the Internet of Things using Machine Learning Algorithms’ and published three research papers. He was awarded with ‘Outstanding Graduate Award’ in 2019.
Zubair joined Ca’ Foscari University of Venice as a PhD scholar in Sep 2020. He is currently working under the supervision of Pietro Ferrara and Stefano Calzavara at Research Institute of Complexity – Campus Scientifico. His main research concerns includes Formal methods, Detection of Security Vulnerabilities, Program Analysis and Verification, Information Flow Security Analysis and Machine Learning.
Raunak Bag completed his master degree in Computer Science from the University of Calcutta, India in 2021. As part of his masters project he created an online collaboration application which brings people with ideas closer to those who can help them create, design and/or develop it under the supervision of Prof. Navendu Chaki, University of Calcutta. His specialties include VLSI design and computer architecture.
Raunak joined Ca’ Foscari University of Venice as a PhD student in January 2022 under the supervision of Prof. Agostino Cortesi. His research focuses on requirement specification and static analysis of robotic software. His research interests are Internet of Things, computer architecture, VLSI design and cyber security.
Purbasha Chowdhury is currently a research fellow in Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia in the domain of “Data User Security Trust” under supervision of Prof. Agostino Cortesi. She received Master of Technology degree in computer science and engineering from University of Calcutta, India. As part of her master’s project, she worked on a project entitled “Incorporation Multiple Bioassay and Cross Contamination Avoidance in Digital Microfluidic Biochip” which allows to perform different assay operations (nPI, PCR, CPA, In-Vitro) in parallel way on a newly designed pin constrained layout by avoiding the cross contaminations under the supervision of Prof. Rajat Kumar Pal, University of Calcutta. Her specialties include VLSI design. Her research interest includes Machine Learning, IOT, Cyber Security.
Former members
Martina Olliaro is currently a research fellow in Università Ca’ Foscari. She received her PhD in Computer Science at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and Masaryk University of Brno (Czech Republic), under the supervision of both Professors Agostino Cortesi and Vashek Matyas. She started her double PhD degree programme in 2017 and she spent one year at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, where she defended with success her PhD thesis proposal.
Her main research interest concerns string static analysis by means of abstract interpretation theory, with a focus to the string related security issues. She is also interested in watermarking relational databases techniques and in the study of their semantics preservation.
Vincenzo Arceri
Former postdoc, currently assistant professor at University of Parma
Website: https://vincenzoarceri.github.io/
e-mail: vincenzo.arceri@unipr.it
Vincenzo Arceri is a temporary research fellow in Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and PhD candidate in University of Verona. He joined the University of Verona in October 2016, as PhD student in Computer Science, under the supervision of Prof. Isabella Mastroeni and he concluded the PhD program in October 2019. He will defend his PhD thesis, named “Taming Strings in Dynamic Languages – An Abstract Interpretation-based Static Analysis Approach” in May 2020.
Vincenzo Arceri is a temporary research fellow in Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and PhD candidate in University of Verona. He joined the University of Verona in October 2016, as PhD student in Computer Science, under the supervision of Prof. Isabella Mastroeni and he concluded the PhD program in October 2019. He will defend his PhD thesis, named “Taming Strings in Dynamic Languages – An Abstract Interpretation-based Static Analysis Approach” in May 2020.
Mohammad Imran Alam
Former postdoc, currently assistant professor at IIT Jaipur, India
Mohammad Imran Alam received an M.Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India, in 2015. He joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India as a Ph.D. student in 2016 under the supervision of Dr. Raju Halder, and he finished Ph.D. activities in September 2020. He will defend his thesis in May-June 2021. He is currently working as a research fellow in Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy.
His research interest includes Database, Formal Methods, Program Analysis and Verification, Model Checking, Information Flow Security Analysis, Blockchain, and Machine learning.