Professor Marta Kwiatkowska FRS MAE led this year’s Lovelace lecture. She was awarded the 2019 BCS Lovelace Medal for her research in probabilistic and quantitative verification. Since 2001 she has led the development of the highly influential probabilistic model checker PRISM.
Computing systems have become indispensable in our society, supporting us in almost all tasks, from social interactions and online banking to robotic assistants and implantable medical devices.
Since software faults in such systems can have disastrous consequences, methods based on mathematical logic, such as proof assistants or model checking, have been developed to ensure their correctness.
However, many computing systems employ probability, for example as a randomisation technique in distributed protocols, or to quantify uncertainty in the environment for AI and robotics applications.
