Robert van Glabbeek

Prof. Dr. Robert J. van Glabbeek

Mail: NICTA, Locked Bag 6016, UNSW,Sydney, NSW 1466, Australia
Office: Room 410, Level 4, NICTA, 223 Anzac Parade, Kensington, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
Phone: +61 2 8306 0492
Fax: +61 2 8306 0405
Email: Robert.vanGlabbeek@nicta.com.au

Home page: http://theory.stanford.edu/~rvg

Rob van Glabbeek has a strong international reputation in the study of the theory of concurrent computation, having made particular contributions to the conciliation of the interleaving and the true concurrency communities by codeveloping the current view of branching time and causality as orthogonal but interacting dimensions of concurrency. He condensed many divergent views on semantic equivalences into the linear time- branching time spectrum. The resulting publications are required reading in the graduate programs of several universities. Together with Peter Weijland he invented the notion of branching bisimulation, that since has become the prototypical example of a branching time equivalence, and the semantic equivalence used in most verification tools based on equivalence checking. With Ursula Goltz he proposed the notion of action refinement as a useful tool for evaluating semantic equivalences and implementation relations. This gave rise to a wave of publications, including a dozen Ph.D. theses. With Peter Rittgen he initiated the application of process algebraic methods in the formal description and analysis of economic production processes. As consultant for Ricoh innovations he contributed to the practical application of concurrency-theoretic ideas in workflow management. With Dominic Hughes he made a crucial contribution to the proof theory of linear logic by proposing a notion of proof net that had been sought after in vain by linear logicians since the inception of linear logic. Together with Vaughan Pratt he initiated the now widespread use of higher dimensional automata and other geometric models of concurrency. With Gordon Plotkin he integrated various causality respecting models of concurrency, including Petri nets, event structures and propositional theories. With Wan Fokkink he used results from unification theory and from modal logic to obtain compositionality results in structural operational semantics. In 2007, in cooperation with Yuxin Deng, Matthew Hennessy, Carroll Morgan and Chenyi Zhang, he characterised the may- and must-testing preorders for processes with probabilistic and nondeterministic choice, thereby solving a problem that was posed in 1992 and has remained open ever since. In 2011, together with NICTA colleagues Peter Höfner, Annabelle MvIver, Ansgar Fehnker, Marius Portman and Wee Lum Tan, he developed a new process algebra for wireless mesh networks and used it to obtain the first rigorous formalisation of the specification of the popular Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol. This revealed that under a plausible interpretation of original specification of AODV, the protocol does admit routing loops; this is in direct contradiction with popular belief, the promises of the AODV specification, and the main paper on AODV (with 13000 citations). The NICTA team also proved loop-freedom of AODV under a subtly different interpretation of the original specification. In 2012, together with Ursula Goltz and Jens Schicke-Uffmann, he gave a precise characterisation of the class of concurrent systems, modelled as plain Petri nets, that, without making concessions on branching time behaviour, concurrency or divergence, cannot be implemented in a distributed way using only asynchronous communication.
      In addition, he has organised workshops on combining compositionality and concurrency, on logic, language and information, on the Unified Modelling Language, on workflow management, web services and business process modelling, on automatic and semi-automatic system verification, on structural operational semantics, and on formal methods for embedded systems. He is editor-in-chief of Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science, a member of the editorial boards of Information and Computation and Theoretical Computer Science, and has been on several dozen program committees.

Degrees

Rob van Glabbeek earned his Masters degree in Mathematics (cum laude) from the University of Leiden, and a PhD from the Free University in Amsterdam. His thesis was entitled Comparative concurrency semantics and refinement of actions.

Affiliations

Besides being a Principal Researcher at NICTA, Dr. van Glabbeek is a Conjoint Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, and a Research Affiliate at the Concurrency Group in the Computer Science Department of Stanford University.

Previous Positions

Professor van Glabbeek has been active as a research scientist in the field of Formal Methods since 1984, of which five years were spent at CWI in Amsterdam and twelve years at Stanford University. In addition he has had visiting appointments at the Technical University of Munich, GMD in Bonn, INRIA in Sophia Antipolis, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Cambridge, and l'Université de la Méditerranée in Marseilles. He has also been active as a consultant for Ricoh Innovations, California, in the area of workflow modelling.

Research Interests

Professor van Glabbeek’s research interests include: models of concurrency, process algebra, compositional implementation relations, structural operational semantics, proof nets for linear logic, routing algorithms for wireless mesh networks, temporal logic, synchronous versus asynchronous communication in distributed systems, and building a theory of processes with probabilities and nondeterminism.

Collaborations

Professor van Glabbeek maintains close ties with the concurrency group at Stanford University and the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. His work on proof nets and on concurrency modelling is to a large extent in cooperation with these groups. Van Glabbeek also participates in research activities in process algebra and structural operational semantics that span many European sites, including Eindhoven University of Technology, the Free University in Amsterdam and Trinity College, Dublin. His work on synchronous versus asynchronous communication is in cooperation with Professor Goltz at the University of Braunschweig.

Publications