Maria Christakis

Prof. Maria Christakis is a Full Professor in the Faculty of Informatics at TU Wien, leading the Rigorous Software Engineering Group and the Software Engineering Research Unit (E194-01). Her research focuses on developing reliable software tools, emphasizing formal methods, program analysis, and automated testing. She holds leadership roles including Curriculum Coordinator for Software Engineering programs and Faculty Council membership.

Her research interests span automatic test generation, program verification, and improving developer productivity through novel techniques. Notable projects include the 'Sherlock' framework for testing program analyzers and 'Olympia' for Solidity fuzzer benchmarking. Awards include Amazon and Google Research Awards, and she actively contributes to conferences like CAV, ASE, and IJCAI.

Prof. Christakis advises over 15 students (PhD, Master's, and project students) and has supervised numerous alumni. She teaches core courses like Advanced Software Engineering and oversees Bachelor/Master curricula. Her work bridges formal verification and systematic testing, with tools like 'queryFuzz' and 'LIBRA' addressing neural network fairness and SMT solver reliability.

Current projects include the 'Nomos' specification language for machine learning safety and the 'LaZ' framework for lazy testing. She co-leads the Automated Reasoning doctoral school and collaborates with institutions like MPI-SWS and Microsoft Research.