Burcu Kulahcioglu Ozkan

As software systems have become ubiquitous, modern applications are designed to be highly concurrent, responsive, fault-tolerant, and distributed. The increased complexity of these systems makes it more challenging to produce correct software.

My research aims to produce rigorous and practical software tools for increasing the reliability of software systems: It brings the advantages of the rigorous approaches of formal methods together with the practical approaches of sofware engineering. To this end, my research spans formal methods, model checking, software testing, and debugging with a focus on concurrent and distributed systems. You can find more in my interview “Challenges of Concurrency” at the I/O Magazine, ICT Platform Nederland.

At TU Delft, I lead and take supervisory role in several research teams and projects:

• I lead the FORSE (Lightweight Formal Methods for Software Engineering) lab, where my team develops automated software analysis techniques for concurrent and distributed systems. Our research has been funded by personal academic research grants from the Amazon Research Award and Stellar Academic Research Grant.

• I am the co-PI of Ripple’s UBRI program at TU Delft together with Annibale Panichella. Our lab focuses on testing and debugging of blockchain systems and their applications.

• I lead a research track of the TU Delft - JetBrains collaboration, AISE. Our track aims to utilize the runtime information to improve software development and quality.

News:

• Call for papers for the Third Workshop on Future Debugging Techniques DEBT’25 colocated with ECOOP’25 is open! We are looking for your submissions. Submission Deadline: April 25, 2025

• I’ll give the keynote talk at FORTE’25 - the 45th International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems at DisCoTec’25 - the 20th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, June 16-20, Lille, France.

• I’ll give an invited tutorial at VLDB Summer School on 28-31 July 2025, University of Wroclaw, Poland. The VLDB Summer School aims to bring together early-stage research students and international experts in Database Management Systems for a multi-day event. Check out the summer school website for the applications.

• I’ll give an invited talk at SEN’25 Symposium, National Symposium on Software engineering (SEN), 23 May 2025. Amsterdam, Netherlands.

• Invited talk at Sabanci University, 4 December 2024, Istanbul, Turkey.

• Serve in the PCs of ICSE’26, CAV’25, ICST’25, ESOP’25, Programming’25, and FBMC’25.

• Invited talk on “Model-Guided Testing of Distributed Systems” at “IPA Fall Days on Models for Constructing Software” on 6 November 2024, The Institute for Programming research and Algorithmics, Netherlands.

• Great news! 🚀 Congratulations to my students for having two accepted papers at ISSTA/ECOOP’24!

  • Congrats to Ege Berkay Gulcan and João Neto for their paper “Generalized Concurrency Testing Tool in ISSTA/ECOOP tool track! Check out DSTest!

  • Congrats to Bob Brockbernd for his paper “Understanding Concurrency Bugs in Real-World Programs with Kotlin Coroutines” together with Nikita Koval and Arie van Deursen in ECOOP!
  • We also invite the students in the research area to attend the Doctoral Symposium at ISSTA/ECOOP’24!

  
  

• Gave a talk on “Testing Blockchain Implementations” at “UBRI Connect 2024” in September in Zurich. UBRI Connect brings scholars, researchers, and thought leaders in the UBRI network to showcase blockchain initiatives, share knowledge, and inspire future research.

• It was great to organize ISSTA/ECOOP’24 Doctoral Symposium and come together with the PhD students in the research area at ISSTA/ECOOP in Vienna! The ECOOP/ISSTA 2024 Doctoral Symposium brings together doctoral students working in the area of software testing and analysis and give them the opportunity to present and discuss their research goals, methods, and preliminary results in a constructive and international atmosphere. We had two amazing keynotes by Andreas Zeller and Eric Jul.

• Served in the PCs of ASPLOS’24, OOPSLA’24, FBMC’24, VMCAI’24, NETYS’24, SEFM’24 and VSTTE’24.

• Gave an invited talk at “VDS - Verification of Distributed Systems” workshop colocated with NETYS’24.

• Organized ACM Student Research Competition together with Philipp Haller at Programming 2024.

• Gave an invited talk at “Randomized Testing of Byzantine Fault Tolerant Algorithms”, presenting our OOPSLA’23 paper in the internal seminar of Aptos Labs.

• Gave an invited keynote talk at SEFM’23 - The 21st International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods, held in 6-10 November 2023, organized by Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.

• Attended Dagstuhl Seminar 23441: Ensuring the Reliability and Robustness of Database Management Systems on October 29-November 03, 2023.

• Great news! Our paper “Randomized Testing of Byzantine Fault Tolerant Algorithms” has received “Distinguished paper award” at OOPSLA’23! (pdf)

• Happy to share that I’ve received “Stellar Academic Research Grant” for my research proposal on “Feedback-guided fault injection testing of blockchain systems”. Thanks to Stellar Development Foundation for supporting my research!

• It was great to give a tutorial at the First Summer School on Distributed and Replicated Environments (DARE’23) (11-15 September), and Second Summer School on Security Testing and Verification (11-13 September), held in Brussels, Belgium.

• Excited to share that I’ve received an “Amazon Research Award” for my proposal “Coverage-directed randomized testing of distributed systems”. More about the program on the Amazon Science website.

• Congratulations to my Honour’s Programme students Levin Winter and Florena Buse for receiving Ripple’s Bug Bounty Award, working on our randomized testing method, ByzzFuzz for testing blockchain implementations. Very well done with the detection and source code fix of the bug! Levin Winter’s contribution to the bug fix is acknowledged in the release notes of XRP Ledger version 1.10.0.

• The deadline for scholarship applications for Verification Mentoring Workshop (VMW)’23, we co-organize together with Ankush Desai, Eric Koskinen, Marijana Lazic, and Matteo Sammartino, is extended to May 5th! VMW’23 will be co-located with the Int. Conf. on Computer Aided Verification (CAV)’23 in Paris, France, in July 17-22, 2023.

• [2023] Served in the PCs of VMCAI’23, MET’23, CAV’23, OOPSLA’23, and VSTTE’23.

• [Apr’23] The call for papers for the ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop’23, we co-chair together with Kiko Fernandez-Reyes, is open. Submissions related to Erlang, Elixir, Lisp Flavored Erlang, and topics in functional, concurrent, and distributed programming are welcome and encouraged!

• [March’23] Attended the Dagstuhl Seminar 23112: Unifying Formal Methods for Trustworthy Distributed Systems on March 12-15, 2023.

• [Feb’23] Our paper Randomized Testing of Byzantine Fault Tolerant Algorithms with Levin N. Winter, Florena Buse, Daan de Graaf, and Klaus von Gleissenthall has been accepted to OOPSLA’23! (pdf)

• [Jan’23] Our paper “Probabilistic Concurrency Testing for Weak Memory Programs” with Mingyu Gao and Soham Chakraborty appears at ASPLOS’23! (pdf)

• [Jan’23] Invited talk at the SUMO (SUpervision of large MOdular and distributed systems) team seminar at Inria Rennes Bretagne-Atlantique research center and IRISA lab on January 12, 2023.

• [Dec’22] Our paper “Evolutionary Approach for Concurrency Testing of Ripple Blockchain Consensus Algorithm” with Martijn van Meerten and Annibale Panichella appears at ICSE-SEIP’23.

• [Dec’22] Attended the Dagstuhl Seminar 22492: Formal Methods and Distributed Computing: Stronger Together on December 4-9, 2022.

• [Dec’22] Happy to interview with the I/O Magazine, ICT Platform Nederland about “Challenges of Concurrency”.

• [Nov’22] Organized the third edition of the Alice and Eve Workshop for celebrating women in computing at TU Delft on November 18, 2022.

• [Sep’22] PC-chaired the Erlang Workshop’22 that will be co-located with ICFP’22 together with Stavros Aronis.

• [Jun’22] Chaired the Expert discussion track at the ECOOP’22 together with Manu Sridharan.

• Served in the PCs of ESOP’22 and ICST’22, and ASE 2022 NIER.

• Attended Dagstuhl Seminar 21442: Ensuring the Reliability and Robustness of Database Management Systems on November 1-4, 2021.

• Invited talk at the FMT (Formal Methods and Tools) Group at the University of Twente, on July 1st, 2021.

• Served in the PCs of ECOOP’21, Erlang’21, and SAS’21.

• Invited talk at the SEN Symposium 2021 (National Symposium Software Engineering in The Netherlands) on February 18th, 2021.

• I am excited to start working as an Assistant Professor at the TU Delft Software Engineering Research Group (SERG) as of September’20.

• I am honoured to receive the Delft Technology Fellowship for outstanding female academic researchers.

Academic Geneology