Michele Chiari will be the co-Chair of VeriProP 2023

Michele Chiari will co-chair VeriProP 2023, the 3rd Workshop on Verification of Probabilistic Programs, co-located with CAV 2023.

Probabilistic programs are a structured way to describe computations or models with access to some source of randomness. They appear naturally in various safety-, security-, and privacy-critical applications, including randomized algorithms, security protocols, and autonomous systems working in uncertain environments, e.g., due to imprecise sensors.

The behavior of probabilistic programs is often counterintuitive — a consequence of the well-known fact that humans have difficulties reasoning about stochastic processes. In combination with their importance in emerging safety-critical domains, the counterintuitive nature of probabilistic programs means that ensuring their correctness must be based on verification and analysis techniques that are rigorous, tool-supported, and, ideally, largely automated. However, such tools have not kept up with the increasing usage and popularity of probabilistic programs.

In part, the lack of tool support can be explained by the fact that research on probabilistic programs is spread over multiple fields. In addition to the classical understanding of probabilistic programs as randomized algorithms, probabilistic programs have received rapidly increasing attention as a modeling formalism for complex probability distributions in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science.

This workshop will provide a forum for research on the automated verification of probabilistic systems that are in some way described by a programming language, with a particular focus on both symbolic methods and compositional approaches.