image: CISPA-Faculty Dr. Rayna Dimitrova receives a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council for her research on synthesis of reactive systems.
Credit: Ebelshäuser/CISPA
The ERC Consolidator Grant is one of Europe’s most prestigious funding schemes and supports high-risk, high-reward research projects. SyReP tackles a core challenge that existing methods fail to address: once reactive systems must operate on real-world data—such as sensor readings, user inputs, or complex system states—classical synthesis approaches break down. “Traditional methods strictly separate decision-making from the data used to make those decisions. That may be theoretically elegant, but it fails in modern software practice,” Dimitrova explains. SyReP seeks to eliminate this separation by developing techniques that reason about control and data together. The goal is that developers will only need to specify what a system should do, while the correct implementation is generated automatically.
Program Synthesis with Native Data Awareness
In SyReP, Dimitrova combines formal synthesis algorithms with logical reasoning over unbounded data domains. The aim is a framework that does not merely verify software, but constructs it automatically from its specification. This would mark a major leap forward for safety-critical domains—from medical devices and mobile assistive systems to industrial control software. “I am fascinated by the question of whether we can construct complex software correctly rather than just checking it after the fact—one of computer science’s long-standing open problems. The ERC Grant finally gives me the opportunity to explore this vision in depth,” says Dimitrova.
A distinguishing element of SyReP is a new synthesis paradigm that treats data not as an afterthought, but as an integral part of the synthesis process. Dimitrova’s team is developing novel symbolic algorithms and so-called realizability certificates, from which comprehensible program components can be automatically extracted. This combination is designed to take synthesis from elegant theory into real development workflows. “My project will fundamentally change how synthesis methods reason about data, overcoming the core limitations that have restricted the scope and scalability of previous approaches,” Dimitrova explains.
A Milestone for the Research Program
For Dimitrova, the grant is a transformative opportunity: “The ERC gives me the freedom to pursue a topic that is often considered too risky or too ambitious, even though it has the potential to fundamentally change how we develop software.” If successful, SyReP could provide a new paradigm for software development—from manually writing code to precisely specifying desired system behavior while the implementation is synthesized automatically.
About the ERC
The European Research Council (ERC), established by the European Union in 2007, is Europe’s premier funding organization for frontier research. It supports outstanding researchers of any nationality who wish to carry out ambitious projects in Europe. In addition to Consolidator Grants, the ERC awards Starting, Advanced, and Synergy Grants, as well as Proof-of-Concept Grants that help translate scientific results into innovation. Since November 1, 2021, the ERC has been led by its president, Maria Leptin.