Maria Christakis

Prof. Maria Christakis is a full professor at TU Wien's Faculty of Informatics, leading the Rigorous Software Engineering Group and the Software Engineering Research Unit. Her research focuses on developing reliable software tools and improving developer productivity through formal methods, automatic test generation, and program analysis.

She holds a PhD from ETH Zurich and a diploma from the National Technical University of Athens. Her work bridges verification and systematic testing, with notable contributions to fuzzing, static analysis, and neural network certification. Key projects include tools like Harvey (smart contract fuzzer), DeepSearch (neural network attack framework), and Nomos (specification language for machine learning models).

Her research has received awards including the Best Presentation Award at FSE'20 and a Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE'16. She advises multiple PhD and master's students and teaches courses in advanced software engineering and formal methods. Current projects explore green fuzzer benchmarking, compositional smart contract verification, and testing code translation models.

• Grants: Austrian Science Fund (FWF) doctoral school on Automated Reasoning
• Labs/Teams: Rigorous Software Engineering Group, Software Engineering Research Unit