news
News from the Software Languages Lab.
| Sep 21, 2026 | Congratulations to Dr. Mathijs Saey, who defended the PhD thesis “Modular Distribution Strategies in Stream Processing Applications: a Meta-programming Approach”, promoted by Wolfgang De Meuter and Quentin Stiévenart. Dissertation |
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| Sep 21, 2026 | In a webinar held in the context of the EU project CRACY, SOFT introduced the first version of its free, open-source SBOM augmentation tool, which analyses source code directly to build more precise and complete software bills of materials. |
| Sep 07, 2026 | The fifth edition of the Summer School on Security Testing and Verification, a joint initiative of KU Leuven and the VUB, took place on the VUB campus from 7 to 10 September 2026, co-chaired by Coen De Roover. |
| Jun 29, 2026 | The paper “TurtleTalk: A DSL for Constraint-Based Turtle Graphics in Programmatic CAD” by Jef Jacobs, Wolfgang De Meuter, and Jens Nicolay won the Best Paper Award at GPCE 2026, co-located with ECOOP 2026 in Brussels. |
| Jun 29, 2026 | SOFT hosted ECOOP 2026, the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, at the VUB from 29 June to 3 July 2026, with Wolfgang De Meuter as General Chair. Elisa Gonzalez Boix and Coen De Roover co-chaired the ECOOP Academy, the summer school for graduate and senior undergraduate students held alongside the conference. |
| Jun 23, 2026 | SOFT presented CRACY-SCA in a webinar: an open-source tool that applies software composition analysis to Infrastructure as Code, detecting hidden dependencies, known vulnerabilities, and insecure configurations in Ansible playbooks. |
| Jun 04, 2026 | Elisa Gonzalez Boix delivered a keynote on programming distributed systems with replicated state at GDR SciLog 2026, the first Congrès des Sciences du Logiciel, at Polytech Lille, France. |
| May 19, 2026 | SOFT (Coen De Roover) and DistriNet (KU Leuven, Bert Lagaisse) organised the public kick-off of the COOCK+ project CodeGuard on secure software engineering in a GenAI world, at KU Leuven’s Group T campus, with some 50 companies attending. |
| May 12, 2026 | Giacomo Benedetti and Noah Van Es gave a hands-on workshop on building and securing CI/CD pipelines, featuring open-source tools for the static and dynamic testing of GitHub Actions workflows, as part of the VLAIO COOCK+ project BUGATTI. |
| Apr 24, 2026 | Registration opened for DARE 2026, the 4th Summer School on Distributed and Replicated Environments: a series that started at SOFT in Brussels in 2023, under the coordination of Elisa Gonzalez Boix. |
| Feb 01, 2026 | Jim Bauwens presented research on distributed abstractions and techniques for replicated state in the Local-first, sync engines, CRDT developer room at FOSDEM’26. |
| Nov 23, 2025 | As every year, SOFT organised an activity for youngsters at Dag van de Wetenschap: programming microcontrollers for everyone. |
| Nov 13, 2025 | SOFT kicked off the FWO project SODISA, led by Elisa Gonzalez Boix, at the Cyber Security Industry Day 2025. |
| Sep 01, 2025 | The paper “Smelling Secrets: Leveraging Machine Learning and Language Models for Sensitive Parameter Detection in Ansible” by Ruben Opdebeeck, Valeria Pontillo, Camilo Velázquez-Rodríguez, Wolfgang De Meuter, and Coen De Roover won the Distinguished Research Paper Award at SCAM 2025. |
| Jul 08, 2025 | SOFT hosted ECRTS 2025, the 37th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems, in Brussels from 8 to 11 July 2025, with Antonio Paolillo as General Chair. |
| Jul 07, 2025 | SOFT hosted the 4th Summer School on Security Testing and Verification in Brussels, co-chaired by Coen De Roover, with lectures on static analysis, abstract interpretation, formal verification, security testing, fuzzing, and concolic testing. |
| May 21, 2025 | The FWO funds the SODISA project of Elisa Gonzalez Boix on scalable software development and infrastructure. |
| May 01, 2025 | The dataset “E2EGit: A Dataset of End-to-End Web Tests in Open Source Projects” by Sergio Di Meglio, Luigi Libero Lucio Starace, Valeria Pontillo, Ruben Opdebeeck, Coen De Roover, and Sergio Di Martino won the Distinguished Dataset Award at MSR 2025. |
| Nov 04, 2024 | Congratulations to Dr. Jens Van der Plas, who defended the PhD thesis “Incremental Static Program Analysis through Reified Computational Dependencies”, promoted by Coen De Roover and Quentin Stiévenart. Dissertation |
| Oct 25, 2024 | Congratulations to Dr. Ruben Opdebeeck, who defended the PhD thesis “Static Analysis for Quality Assurance of Ansible Infrastructure-as-Code Artefacts”, promoted by Coen De Roover. Dissertation |
| Oct 01, 2024 | The paper “Visualizing the Evolution of Systems and their Library Dependencies” by Raula Gaikovina Kula, Coen De Roover, Daniel German, Takashi Ishio, and Katsuro Inoue won the Most Influential Paper Award at VISSOFT 2024, ten years after its publication. |
| Aug 23, 2024 | Congratulations to Dr. Jim Bauwens, who defended the PhD thesis “Flexible CRDTs for a Demanding World”, promoted by Elisa Gonzalez Boix. Dissertation |
| Apr 22, 2024 | Congratulations to Dr. Ward Muylaert, who defended the PhD thesis “Data Flow and Control Flow Analysis of Problematic Commits”, promoted by Coen De Roover. Dissertation |
| Mar 29, 2024 | Congratulations to Dr. Camilo Velázquez-Rodríguez, who defended the PhD thesis “Extracting Library Features from Incomplete Code on Stack Overflow”, promoted by Coen De Roover. Dissertation |
| Jan 26, 2024 | Congratulations to Dr. Isaac Nyabisa Oteyo, who defended the PhD thesis “DisCoPar-Kilimo: A Low-Code Development Environment Geared Towards Smart Agriculture Applications”, promoted by Elisa Gonzalez Boix and Wolfgang De Meuter. Dissertation |
| Jan 01, 2024 | SOFT, with Wolfgang De Meuter as PI for the VUB, is a partner in the Cybersecurity Research Program Flanders (2024–2028), the successor of the Cybersecurity Initiative Flanders in which the lab took part since 2019. |
| Dec 12, 2023 | The FWO funds the EVEREST project of Elisa Gonzalez Boix on nearly fully automatic verification for geo-replicated systems. |
| Nov 01, 2023 | Antonio Paolillo joined SOFT as a professor, adding system software, such as operating systems and real-time systems, to the lab’s research. |
| Oct 01, 2023 | SOFT, directed by Wolfgang De Meuter, is now recognised as one of the VUB’s Large Research Groups. |
| Sep 11, 2023 | SOFT hosted DARE, the first Summer School on Distributed and Replicated Environments, coordinated by Elisa Gonzalez Boix. |
| May 16, 2023 | SOFT hosted the Vloeberghs Chair lecture series of Prof. Dr. Ralf Lämmel (University of Koblenz-Landau) on software analytics. |