Radu started his PhD at UCD in October 2005 under the joint supervision of Dr. Joe Kiniry and Dr. Simon Dobson. He has a BSc in Telecommunications and Computer Networks from Politehnica University of Bucharest and has worked in the industry for 2.5 years on translators used in the hardware verification industry.

His main interests are formal methods and generally good programming practices/methodologies. A methodology is good if it results in good programs. Paraphrasing Knuth, a program can be good in many ways: it can be correct, it can be fast, it can be friendly, it can be timely. The most promising way for increasing the quality of programs as measured by whether they are correct or not is the use of formal methods.

The three projects he worked on while in industry are:

• s2x - a program for generating checkers in procedural languages using PSL (a formal spec language) as input
• vfe - a front-end for RuleBase and FoCs that basically did a translation from PSL2 to PSL1
• e2vera - a translator between two high-level languages widely used in hardware verification (e and Vera)

His interests during college ranged over: using genetic algorithms to synthesize analog ICs, developing heuristics and tools for efficient network design (that were actually used as helpers for a nationwide telecom network), participating in (algorithm) programming competitions. You can find out more about what he cares and what he does by watching this ongoing saga.