Global society increasingly relies on devices controlled by software, from TV sets to vehicle braking systems. It is considered a "fact-of-life" that software contains errors, which can come at great cost, such as the Mars Polar Lander crash or the 1992 failure of the London Ambulance Dispatch Service. In a 2008 study, the US NIST agency estimates faulty software costs the US economy $59.5bn annually. Classically software is tested by running it under as many difficult situations as possible. However, it is not feasible to run a program under all environments. Hence, testing relies on the perspicacity of the testing engineer who must carefully choose environments that may expose flaws. Modern computers increase performance by allowing many computer programs to run concurrently. Anticipating the interactions of even as a little as two programs is an extremely difficult task, and errors are often difficult to replicate and diagnose. Furthermore, the efficiency of hardware is often increased by permitting behaviours a software developer would not expect. An alternative approach to ensuring correctness is model-checking. Model-checking attempts to use fully automatic techniques to prove that a program behaves as expected under all conditions. This area has flourished recently, including a 2007 Turing Award for Clarke, Emerson and Sifakis, who transformed the technique from a theoretical pursuit into an industrially applicable product. Model-checking is embraced by companies like Microsoft (to improve its Windows OS) and Altran-Praxis (for safety-critical software). However, model-checkers must rely on simplified models of computer programs to guarantee results, leading to many correct programs being labelled erroneous. This is a design choice, following the argument that it it better to raise a false alarm, than let an error pass by. However, a large number of false alarms damage reliability and usability --- a software developer will not study reported errors carefully if the majority are, in fact, not errors at all. This is a real problem in the large scale deployment of such tools. The goal of this fellowship is to increase the precision of verification tools --- reducing the number of false alarms --- while retaining the efficiency of current techniques, resulting in model-checking tools that are more reliable and usable. During this fellowship, we will construct a state-of-the-art verification framework, unifying several prototypical tools and requiring novel model-checking techniques, and permitting new ideas to be experimented with quickly. The framework will be tested on real-world software to ensure its usability and reliability. It will accurately model difficult programming paradigms, such as modern concurrent behaviours and "higher-order" constructs (increasingly embraced by state-of-the-art programming languages). The research will be carried out at Imperial College London, and will bring together researchers at Oxford University, Universite Paris-Est, and Universite Paris-Diderot as well as the CARP project, based across several universities and companies world-wide, and researchers at Microsoft Research, Cambridge.

The increases of population lifetime and of the accidents are the two main reasons explaining the growing interest of the scientific community in studying the osteoarticular system. Although implant and osteoarticular prostheses have been widely used in clinical routine since more than 30 year and have allowed considerable therapeutic and esthetic improvements, a lot of optimizations and developments of their performances remain to be done. In particular, dental implants are widely used for maxillofacial rehabilitation purposes, with more than 400 000 implant surgery per year in France. Many cases of failure still happen due to a bad timing in the implant loading with the prosthesis. This is due to the fact that a reliable tool capable of verifying the quality of osseointegration is still missing. Such failures induce pain, degraded mastication conditions for patients and increased costs for dental surgeons. It still remains difficult to assess the stability of a dental implant and in particular the biomechanical properties of newly formed bone tissue around the implant. OsseoWave aims at developing an evaluation tool to assess the implant stability and to follow the implant osseointegration in the osteoarticular system. The first application to be transferred will be dental implants. The MSME laboratory of University Paris-Est has developed a new method for the follow-up of implants, which is sensitive to the bone-implant interface quality, the only accurate criteria for the implant surgical success. The system uses quantitative ultrasound analysis, which is a non invasive, non radiating and relatively cheap approach. A proof of concept has been demonstrated ex vivo and in vivo, which has allowed a French and PCT patent application and a new statement of invention. We intend to keep on working on in vivo validation experiments in rabbits and to start new ones in dogs in conditions closer to the clinical situation. Moreover, the development of numerical simulation tools will lead to the optimization of the signal processing methods used in the software of the device, which will improve the overall performances of the device. An industrialization study aim at conceiving and manufacturing the final version of the device. Then, the device will be validated in the framework of a preliminary clinical study and the results will be protected through new patent applications. The present project will bring the technology to the CE certification, which is necessary in order to carry out a clinical investigation at a larger scale in the framework of a PHRC funding. The present project will pave the way towards for other applications (ankle, hip and spine among others). The team is constituted by members with complementary skills (dental surgeons experts in oral biology of bone remodeling and researchers specialized in quantitative ultrasound imaging). The project has won the concours national de Création d’entreprise in Emergence and was founded through an Aima project by the Centre Francilien pour l’Innovation and through the ANR project WaveImplant (end: September 2013). These funding have been used to realize an intellectual property study which has shown the freedom to operate of the device and a first in vivo validation. Moreover, the laboratory has been contacted by two leading companies of the dental field (Septodont and Zimmer Dental) for the realization of a dedicated study. The developed technology has been under industrial transfer since mid-2009 which will be concretized through a grant of patent and know-how license to a company to be created and already incubated. The developed technology has the potential to justify a start-up creation because of: - An important, international and growing market with no effective competitors - Multiple possible applications of the technology - Need for a technical expertise but also for a strong industrial and marketing environment

The goal of BIO ART is to develop new bio-epoxy resins from renewable resources without bisphenol A, which is toxic to humans and the environment. BIO ART’s originality comes from the synergy between green chemistry and emerging technologies (multiscale modeling and artificial neural network) and sustainable application in industry. In contrast to purely experimental or exclusively numerical approaches, BIO ART integrates simulations and experiments at length and time scales ranging from the atomistic level to the engineering scale. The proposed project will contribute to close the four knowledge gaps: i) use of exclusively bio-sourced molecules from abundant resources and natural fillers with competitive mechanical properties, ii) multiscale modeling of epoxy including its macromolecular network topology, iii) optimization of the resin formulation by an artificial neural network framework linking the chemical nature of the molecules to the mechanical properties, and iv) advanced mechanical characterization and processing of fiber-reinforced bio-composites. BIO ART’s consortium consists of four complementary Franco-German partners with recognized skills in the synthesis of bio-polymers and physicochemical characterization (ICMPE/FR), in microstructure generation and surrogate models based on artificial neural networks (MSME/FR) as well as in multiscale modeling of polymers and discrete-to-continuum coupling methods (FAU/DE), and in composite processing and advanced mechanical characterization (UBT/DE). The scientific program is divided into 5 work packages: WP1: Synthesis of bio-sourced epoxy, WP2: Characterization of bio-sourced epoxy, WP3: Multiscale modeling, WP4: Optimization of bio-sourced epoxy formulation by artificial neural network, and WP5: Composite processing and mechanical characterization. The work packages are defined in a way that they can be completed in 3 years by 3 collaborating doctoral researchers, one for experimental part and two for the numerical part. A technician will support the experimental PhD candidate as regards the processing and characterization of the obtained materials. Beyond them, BIO ART’s consortium, which is a well-balanced composition of early career and senior scientists, will actively contribute to achieve the project’s milestones. BIO ART’s methods are up-to-date, are based on recently published results, and benefit from the strong synergies with current projects of the project partners. In particular, the experimental and numerical methods will range from the atomistic scale (molecular structure, synthesis of constituents, molecular dynamics simulations), to the mesoscale (curing process, network characterization, network model), and to the macroscale (fracture properties, continuum mechanical simulations). This methodology will focus on the investigation of the relationship between the structure and the multiscale properties of the obtained materials. This approach will synergistically combine modelling with experimental characterizations, which will allow to address the scientific issues of this project. This multidisciplinary scientific approach will allow BIO ART to respond to a current crucial societal issue, i.e. biosourced polymer materials from circular bio-economy, aimed for sustainable development applications