EMSOFT Best Paper Award
The ACM SIGBED International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT) is a leading forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government working on the science and engineering of embedded software. Since 2001, it has showcased cutting-edge research on the design and analysis of software interacting with physical processes, with a strong focus on cyber-physical systems that integrate computation, communication, and physical dynamics.
Ezio Bartocci, together with Hongkai Chen (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China), Zeyu Zhang (Stony Brook University, USA), Shouvik Roy (Illinois Institute of Technology, USA), and Scott Smolka, Scott Stoller, and Shan Lin (all Stony Brook University, USA), have been awarded the EMSOFT Best Paper Award at Embedded Systems Week 2025 for their work on “Cumulative-Time Signal Temporal Logic.“
The work addresses an important gap in specifying and verifying temporal requirements in cyber-physical systems such as microgrids and medical devices. While Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is widely used to express conditions like safety and response time, it cannot capture how long a property remains satisfied within a time interval. CT-STL extends STL with a new cumulative-time operator that compares the total duration for which a condition holds against a threshold.
The authors provide both qualitative and quantitative semantics for CT-STL, prove their soundness and completeness, and develop an efficient online monitoring algorithm. They demonstrate the practical impact of this approach in two case studies: enforcing cumulative safety requirements in a microgrid and monitoring glucose control in an artificial pancreas. The results offer a rigorous and implementable way to reason about “how long” critical properties hold, contributing to more reliable and trustworthy cyber-physical systems.
