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 blockchain systems and their applications.

• I lead a research track of the TU Delft - JetBrains collaboration, AI4SE. Our track aims to improve the software reliability of LLM-based multi-agent systems.

News:

• Looking forward to welcoming you at DEBT’26, the 4th Workshop on Future Debugging Techniques, colocated with ECOOP’26, on June 29 - July 3, in Brussels, Belgium. Check out the website for the accepted papers and the program.

• Delighted to have co-chaired FORTE’26, the 46th International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems, as part of DisCoTec’26 - International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, which took place on June 8-12, in beautiful Urbino 🏰, Italy. Many thanks to my fellow organizers, speakers, and attendees for a fantastic event!

• 🎓 🎉 Happy to share that I’ve been promoted to Associate Professor at TU Delft! Grateful to my colleagues, students, and collaborators who’ve made this journey so rewarding. I look forward to building on my research and teaching in this new role 🚀

• I will serve in the PCs of ICSE’27 and, FSE’27.

• Our research paper “Automated Network-Level Fault Injection Testing of Microservice Architectures”, together with Delano Flipse, Hakan Simsek, and Jérémie Decouchant, has been presented at ICSE’26! The Reynard automated fault-injection testing tool is publicly available here.

• Invited talk at the Bits&Chips Event, Exhibition and conference on challenges in complex software engineering, AI in high-tech, and systems architecture, held on 20 November 2025, in Eindhoven.

• Invited talk at the 28th edition of the Dutch Testing Day (Nederlandse Testdag), will be held on 31 October 2025, in Utrecht. LinkedIn post here.

• Invited tutorial at the Summer School on Distributed and Replicated Environments (DARE’25), held on 8-12 September 2025, in Lisbon, Portugal.

• I serve in the PCs of ICSE’26, OOPSLA’26, CAV’26, and SEFM’26.

• Looking forward to your submissions to DEBT’26, the 4th Workshop on Future Debugging Techniques colocated with ECOOP’26, June 29 - July 3, Brussels, Belgium.

• Looking forward to your submissions to FORTE’26, the 46th International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems. FORTE’26 will take place as part of DisCoTec’26 - International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, June 8-12, Urbino, Italy.

• It was inspiring to give a tutorial and come together with the international experts and keen graduate students at VLDB Summer School on July 28-31 2025, University of Wroclaw, Poland. Find some updates and posts here.

• We’re excited to invite you to DEBT’25 - the Third Workshop on Future Debugging Techniques colocated with ECOOP’25! Looking forward to welcoming you at the workshop on July 4, Bergen, Norway.

• 🚀 Honoured and excited to 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.

• Happy to share that our paper Fuzzing Graph Database Applications with Graph Transformations with my MSc student Melchior Oudemans and co-supervision of Stefania Dumbrava has been awarded the European Association of Software Science and Technology Best Software Science Paper at ICGT’25, June 10-12, Koblenz, Germany.

• Gave an invited talk at SEN’25 Symposium, National Symposium on Software engineering (SEN), organized by VERSEN to bring together the Dutch software engineering, programming languages, and formal methods community. May 23, 2025. Amsterdam, Netherlands.

• Invited participation to VDS’25 - Workshop on Verification of Distributed Systems colocated with NETYS’25, May 19-21, Rabat, Morocco.

• I serve in the PCs SEFM’25, CAV’25, ICST’25, ESOP’25, Programming’25, and FBMC’25.

• Gave an invited talk at Sabanci University, December 4, 2024, Istanbul, Turkey.

• Gave an 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