Prof. Martin Vechev

Prof. Martin Vechev is a Full Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich where he leads the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab and a founder and architect of INSAIT. Prior to ETH Zurich, Vechev was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York, USA (2007-2011). He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, England (2003-2008) and his B.Sc. from Simon Fraser University (SFU), Canada (1996-2001). Before that, he studied at the Sofia High School of Mathematics (SMG). Prof. Vechev’s work spans the broad intersection of artificial intelligence and programming languages, including both theoretical and system aspects. He has given a number of invited and keynote talks on these topics at various conferences and workshops. Together with his group at ETH Zurich, he built a number of systems, widely used in academia and industry, including the creation of the first high-level quantum programming language Silq. Vechev has also co-founded three deep tech start-ups based on groundbreaking research, all of which are positively impacting our world. First, he co-founded DeepCode which built a revolutionary AI system that automatically learned to detect security violations and errors in programs at a scale far beyond what was previously possible. DeepCode was initiated after Vechev’s group helped shape the research area of AI for code, part of ERC Starting Grant: AI for Programming Interview for the ERC. DeepCode was acquired in 2020 by the unicorn cybersecurity giant Snyk. In 2017 he co-founded ChainSecurity which was also acquired in 2020 by PwC and which was the first to bring formal trust and mathematical security guarantees to decentralized systems via advanced automated reasoning. Finally, in 2020, Martin Vechev co-founded LatticeFlow which creates new kinds of systems that enable the development of robust, reliable, and safe AI models, solving a pressing societal problem. Prof. Vechev’s research has received numerous awards and recognitions.