Samanta wins Amazon Research Award

09-15-2021

Congratulations to Professor Roopsha Samanta for her project titled, Automated and Modular Parameterized Verification of Distributed Systems. She is one among the 26 awardees of the Spring 2021 Amazon Research Awards, representing 25 universities in 11 countries. 

The Spring 2021 Amazon Research Awards provides funding awards under two calls for proposals: Alexa Fairness in AI and AWS Automated Reasoning. Samanta’s project falls under the later.

The funded work, led by Samanta, is called Discover[i] (pronounced, discovery). Functioning as an umbrella project, Discover[i] aims to tackle the challenge of verifying unbounded distributed systems through modular and bounded verification. Of particular interest are distributed services such as data stores, locks, and caches built on top of distributed consensus protocols. 

Samanta is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. She leads the Purdue Formal Methods (PurForM) group and is a member of the Purdue Programming Languages (PurPL) group. Before joining Purdue in 2016, she completed her PhD at the University of Texas, Austin in 2013 and was a postdoctoral researcher at Institute of Science and Technology Austria. She is the recipient of a 2019 NSF CAREER award. Her research interests are in program verification, program synthesis, and concurrency. She works at the intersection of formal methods and programming languages to assist both programmers and non-programmers write programs that conform to their intent. 

Amazon Research Awards was founded in 2015 and merged with AWS Machine Learning Research Awards in 2020. The program offers unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to support research at academic institutions and non-profit organizations in areas that align with Amazon’s mission to advance customer-obsessed science.