Professors about themselves: Martin Vechev
Associate professor Martin Vechev leads the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab. His research areas include concurrency, program analysis and synthesis as well as the application of machine learning to programming languages.
Professor Vechev, what are your interests and hobbies outside of science?
I like sports, in particular I have been involved in the sport of Judo for 20+ years and train when I have time (my son is also involved).
What is your favourite insporational quote?
I like many quotes, for instance one of Einstein's quotes: "A problem cannot be solved at the same level of understanding it was created."
What would you do if you had one year of paid leave?
I don't think I can last too long without doing some kind of research, so I would still be involved in something, probably exploring a new area.
If you weren't a scientist, what would you be?
Some kind of musician as my mother, a piano professor, made me play the piano and cello for years before I finally succeeded in escaping to a math high school. :)
What is your guiding philosophy for running your lab and doing research?
We generally like to build systems that solve interesting and important problems in a clean and general way, without limiting ourselves to particular areas. Thus, often, our work is fairly inter-disciplinary in nature, connecting several areas of science. Of great importance to me is the success of individual students at all levels – Bachelor's, Master's and doctorate – both during their studies at ETH, and after.
Name a fun fact about your field or your research.
A funny Twitter comment for one of the public systems we built, external pagejsnice.org (which has about 200,000 users worldwide now) says: "This is too awesome."
What does diversity in computer science mean to you and why is it important?
People of very different backgrounds and perspectives coming together to solve new problems not possible otherwise.
What's the impact of your research on the society?
Some of the probabilistic systems we have released publicly (e.g. external pagejsnice.org, external pageapk-deguard.com) are used on a daily basis by hundreds of people around the world to solve security and software tasks not possible before.