Principles of Systems Design

This Festschrift is dedicated to Thomas A. Henzinger on the occasion of his 60th birthday in 2022.

After studies at Kepler University in Linz and the University of Delaware, Tom’s Ph.D. work in Stanford led to the foundations of models and analysis techniques for real-time systems. The thesis is representative of his entire research career: elegant, deep theoretical results with clear application potential. Tom spent time at the IMAG Laboratory in Grenoble, Cornell, UC Berkeley, EPFL, and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken. In 2009 he became the founding President of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, which under his leadership has become a world-class interdisciplinary research institute.

Tom Henzinger is one of the leading researchers in computer-aided verification. He developed influential models and tools for the design of reactive, timed, and hybrid systems. This laid the theoretical foundation for verifying multi-agent, real-time, and embedded software, extending automata, logics, and verification algorithms from finite-state reactive systems to cyber-physical systems. He has made deep contributions in areas such as software model checking; quantitative notions of correctness and robustness measures for software; graph games for the algorithmic synthesis of control systems; formal methods for increasing trust in machine-learned systems; and executable symbolic models for biological systems.

In all his roles, Tom has promoted excellent science, characterized by intellectual rigor, vision, stimulating collaborations, and elegant communication. This Festschrift volume celebrates his many contributions in the field of computer science, with 31 papers covering various research and application directions, authored by scientists inspired by his efforts and example over many years.

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