VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Lena Verscht
dblp:334/4226
· DBLP profile ↗
2ranked-venue papers
1as first author
2since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0001-6823-7918ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | A Taxonomy of Hoare-Like Logics: Towards a Holistic View using Predicate Transformers and Kleene Algebras with Top and TestsabstractWe study Hoare-like logics, including partial and total correctness Hoare logic, incorrectness logic, Lisbon logic, and many others through the lens of predicate transformers à la Dijkstra and through the lens of Kleene algebra with top and tests (TopKAT). Our main goal is to give an overview – a taxonomy – of how these program logics relate, in particular under different assumptions like for example program termination, determinism, and reversibility. As a byproduct, we obtain a TopKAT characterization of Lisbon logic, which – to the best of our knowledge – is a novel result. Lena Verscht, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski |
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. | 1 |
| 2023 | A Calculus for Amortized Expected RuntimesabstractWe develop a weakest-precondition-style calculus à la Dijkstra for reasoning about amortized expected runtimes of randomized algorithms with access to dynamic memory — the aert calculus. Our calculus is truly quantitative, i.e. instead of Boolean valued predicates, it manipulates real-valued functions. En route to the aert calculus, we study the ert calculus for reasoning about expected runtimes of Kaminski et al. [2018] extended by capabilities for handling dynamic memory, thus enabling compositional and local reasoning about randomized data structures . This extension employs runtime separation logic , which has been foreshadowed by Matheja [2020] and then implemented in Isabelle/HOL by Haslbeck [2021]. In addition to Haslbeck’s results, we further prove soundness of the so-extended ert calculus with respect to an operational Markov decision process model featuring countably-branching nondeterminism, provide extensive intuitive explanations, and provide proof rules enabling separation logic-style verification for upper bounds on expected runtimes. Finally, we build the so-called potential method for amortized analysis into the ert calculus, thus obtaining the aert calculus. Soundness of the aert calculus is obtained from the soundness of the ert calculus and some probabilistic form of telescoping. Since one needs to be able to handle changes in potential which can in principle be both positive or negative, the aert calculus needs to be — essentially — capable of handling certain signed random variables. A particularly pleasing feature of our solution is that, unlike e.g. Kozen [1985], we obtain a loop rule for our signed random variables, and furthermore, unlike e.g. Kaminski and Katoen [2017], the aert calculus makes do without the need for involved technical machinery keeping track of the integrability of the random variables. Finally, we present case studies, including a formal analysis of a randomized delete-insert-find-any set data structure [Brodal et al. 1996], which yields a constant expected runtime per operation, whereas no deterministic algorithm can achieve this. Kevin Batz, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Christoph Matheja, Lena Verscht |
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. | 5 |