Daniel Kroening (born 6 November 1975) is a German computer scientist, Professor in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

, and Chief Science Officer at the company he co-founded,

Diffblue Diffblue Ltd is a spin-out from University of Oxford whose Cover product uses AI to automatically write unit tests for Java code. It is similar to GitHub Copilot in that it uses AI to write code, but differs in that it writes code fully autonomou ...

Ltd. He is a fellow of

Magdalen College Magdalen College (, ) is a constituent college of the University of Oxford. It was founded in 1458 by William of Waynflete. Today, it is the fourth wealthiest college, with a financial endowment of £332.1 million as of 2019 and one of the st ...

Early life

Kroening was born in Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. He attended Marie-Therese-Gymnasium, Erlangen, Bavaria from 1986 to 1990 and Rotenbühl Gymnasium, Saarbrücken, Saarland from 1990 to 1995. Kroening's early work in those highschool years includes implementations of data transfer protocols and a

bulletin board system A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...

(BBS) software package with Internet access management for small

ISP An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

s, which he released under free/open source licenses. In 1992, Kroening joined Handshake e.V., a local non-profit ISP. From 1993, he hosted and operated Handshake's main BBS system and by the end of 1994, it was running his software. Since 1996, he was also involved in Handshake's executive management. After high school, Kroening completed his compulsory community service.

Career

In winter term 1996, Kroening started studying computer science and economics at

Saarland University Saarland University (german: Universität des Saarlandes, ) is a public research university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in si ...

. He received his diploma and doctoral degrees in 1999 and 2001. He was one of the fastest students in the history of the faculty, taking just four and a half years from first year student to doctorate. After receiving his doctorate, Kroening worked at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

as a postdoc before joining

ETH Zürich (colloquially) , former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule , image = ETHZ.JPG , image_size = , established = , type = Public , budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021) , rector = Günther Dissertori , president = Joël Mesot , ac ...

as assistant professor. He finally settled at Oxford University. Kroening's research has its focus on program and hardware analysis. He published textbooks on decision procedures and hardware design. Kroening's professional activities include being a committee member of the leading program analysis conference CAV. In his area of expertise, Kroening served as a consultant for companies like Intel, IBM and Fujitsu. In 2016 he co-founded

Ltd a developer tools company using

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

to write code. He is currently the Chief Science Officer of

Selected publications

*Hasanbeig, M., Jeppu, N.Y., Abate, A., Melham, T. and Kroening, D., "Deepsynth: Automata Synthesis for Automatic Task Segmentation in Deep Reinforcement Learning". AAAI 2020, Vol. 35, No. 9, pages 7647-7656. *Vijay D’Silva, Leopold Haller, Daniel Kroening: Abstract conflict driven learning. POPL 2013: 143-154. *A Survey of Automated Techniques for Formal Software Verification, D’Silva, Vijay, Kroening, Daniel and Weissenbacher, Georg, IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), Vol. 27, No. 7, pages 1165–1178. July 2008. *Decision Procedures — an Algorithmic Point of View, Kroening, Daniel, Strichman, Ofer, Springer. 2008. *Verification of Boolean Programs with Unbounded Thread Creation, Cook, Byron, Kroening, Daniel and Sharygina, Natasha, Theoretical Computer Science (TCS), Vol. 388, pages 227—242. 2007.

References

External links

Private home page (ancient and outdated)

Personal research home page

University home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Kroening, Daniel Living people German computer scientists Saarland University alumni Academics of the University of Oxford 1975 births