Nuno Lopes, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DEI) and researcher in Architectures and High Performance Computing Systems at INESC-ID won two research scholarships: one from Google, in the amount of 35 thousand dollars, to finance a new project in the compilers area, and another from Alpha Woven (a subsidiary of Toyota), of 30 thousand dollars.

The teacher, who develops his research in the area of compilers (computer programs that translate code into programming language) to see if they work correctly, recognizes the importance of his work for the industry. “It is a very important area of computing because we want the software to be written in increasingly high-level languages, in order to increase the productivity of programmers, but also to allow non-programmers to make small programs”, adding that these scholarships are, precisely, to encourage research in the area of compilers.

In the case of Google, says Nuno Lopes, the goal is “to improve interoperability between C++ and Rust (two programming languages). Rust  is a new language, more secure than C++. On the other hand, it’s impossible to rewrite all the C++ code that exists”, indicating that what is intended to be investigated is the best way libraries developed in both languages can work more easily and securely together.

The funding of Woven Alpha will finance a project that Nuno Lopes has been leading for several years – Alive2 – “which is about verifying that a compiler is correct,” he explains. Toyota currently uses the compiler supported by Alive2 “to compile the code for the cars, so they want to ensure that the generated code is correct”, so as to avoid accidents due to eventual anomaly in the compiler, for example.

Nuno Lopes emphasize the importance of these scholarships, given that he joined the academic world and Técnico only in January 2022 and “these scholarships allow to have a working fund to start with the activities” of research in Técnico, such as hiring students and making the acquisition of necessary equipment for his research projects.