Amaury Pouly receives Ackermann Award

Amaury Pouly, a postdoc in Joël Oukanine’s Foundations of Automatic Verification Group, has received the 2017 Ackermann Award for his PhD thesis, “Continuous-time computation models: From computability to computational complexity.” The Ackermann Award is an international prize presented annually to the author of an exceptional doctoral dissertation in the field of Computer Science Logic.

Amaury Pouly’s thesis shows that problems which can be solved with a computer in a reasonable amount of time (more specifically problems which belong to the class P of the famous open problem “P = NP?”) can be characterized as polynomial length solutions of polynomial differential equations. This result paves the way for reformulating certain questions and concepts of theoretical computer science in terms of ordinary polynomial differential equations. It also revisits analog computational models and demonstrates that analog and digital computers actually have the same computing power, both in terms of what they can calculate (computability) and what they can solve in reasonable (polynomial) time.