Jan Friso Groote

“We want to provide technology that enables software engineersto deliver flawless software at reasonable cost.”

Jan Friso Groote is a Full Professor and Chair of Formal Systems Analysis group in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His areas of expertise include Computer systems, architectures, software, algorithms, embedded systems and formal methods. Jan Friso has contributed to  structural operational semantics  and verification technology. His particular contributions include the tyft/tyxt format  for operational rules, the first and also the most efficient algorithms to determine  branching bisimulation and the  cones and foci method  to prove correctness of protocols and distributed algorithms. He is the founding father of the process modeling language and analysis tool set  mCRL2. This toolset makes it possible to describe the behavior of software with data, time and probabilities, whilst proving properties related to this behavior, expressed in the modal mu-calculus, as well as reducing and visualizing this. 

His current research goal is to show that formal analysis techniques can be used to design the software for complete systems. For this it is not only necessary to improve the verification techniques and algorithms, but it is also important to develop software development styles suitable for verification. This reduces the development time with a factor three increasing the quality with a factor 10. Especially regarding the quality, it can be expected that substantial further improvements are possible, hopefully leading to zero defect software.

Jan Friso Groote (1965) studeerde informatica in aan de Technische Hogeschool Twente (nu Universiteit Twente). Hij promoveerde in 1991 op een proefschrift ‘Process algebra and structured operational semantics’ aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam, op basis van onderzoek verricht op het Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica in Amsterdam. Tot 1996 werkte hij als universitair docent aan de faculteit Wijsbegeerte in Utrecht, waana hij groepsleider werd van SEN2 aan het CWI. Sinds 1998 is hij hoogleraar verificatietechnologie voor embedded systemen aan de Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. Vanaf 2016 werkt hij tevens part time bij ASML.