Carlos Varela

Carlos Varela is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). His research focuses on formal verification of cyber-physical systems, cloud/edge computing, and concurrent programming models. He leads the Worldwide Computing Lab at RPI (link).

• B.S., M.S., Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Research Interests: Fundamental distributed computing principles for data-driven aerospace systems, including safety envelopes for flight systems, middleware for adaptive distributed systems, and formal verification of cyber-physical systems. His work extends to self-driving cars and health informatics.

Publication Trends: His recent work emphasizes formal verification of aerospace systems, ethical decision-making in autonomous agents, and middleware for UAV networks. Keywords include cyber-physical systems, edge computing, and data-driven analytics.

Scientific Awards:

• NSF CAREER Award
• Best Paper Awards at HPDC-GECO, eScience, CCGrid, CLEI, DASC
• Industry Awards from IBM, Google, Amazon, and PSEG

Grants & Leadership: His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. He has chaired major conferences like CCGrid 2016 and DDDAS2022, authored a foundational textbook (MIT Press, 2013), and supervised 26 graduate students. As an instrument-rated private pilot with 1100+ flight hours, his work bridges theoretical computer science and practical aerospace systems.