Last November turned out to be a busy but rewarding conference month, with two back-to-back trips to very different corners of the world.
RTS 2025 — Toledo, Spain
The first stop was Toledo, Spain, for the International Workshop on Reconfigurable Transition Systems: Semantics, Logics and Applications (ReacTS 2025). I presented our paper “goLoop: SMT-Based Loop Analysis via Global Optimization”, which addresses a well-known limitation in bounded model checking. To reason about loops, the standard approach requires unrolling them to a fixed bound, which can quickly increase the problem complexity or miss behaviors beyond that bound. Our work reformulates the SMT equations generated by bounded model checking as an optimization problem, allowing the loop itself to remain intact as a sub-function rather than being unrolled. Our findings indicate that this can make the analysis more efficient and represents a complementary approach to conventional bounded model checking.
Toledo itself was a fascinating backdrop to the workshop. The city sits on a rocky hill and has preserved an extraordinary layering of history within its medieval walls. The narrow, winding streets of the old town are worth every wrong turn.
ASYDE 2025 — Seoul, South Korea
A few weeks later, the second conference took me considerably further: Seoul, South Korea, for the International Workshop on Automated and verifiable Software sYstem DEvelopment (ASYDE 2025). There I presented “BMuzz: Combining Bounded Model Checking and Fuzzing to Enhance Code Coverage”, which evaluates bounded model checking and fuzzing in a portfolio approach. The motivation is to leverage the individual strengths of both bounded model checking and fuzzing to enhance code coverage of a given test suite.
Seoul is a very impressive city. Compared to any German city, the scale, energy, and density of the place is almost overwhelming. And since we are talking about Korea, the food simply cannot go unmentioned — every meal felt like it deserved its own conference talk.
Both trips were excellent opportunities not only to visit new places but also to exchange ideas with the broader research community, and it is always motivating to see the work in one’s research field presented and discussed in person.