Vincenzo Ciancia

ISTI-CNR Pisa

Last updated: December 2023

About Me

I am a researcher at ISTI-CNR in Pisa, working in the Formal Methods & Tools Laboratory. Previously, I've been working at the IIT-CNR in Pisa, at the ILLC (University of Amsterdam), and at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid.

I received my Ph.D. in 2009 from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pisa, under the supervision of Prof. Ugo Montanari. My Ph.D. thesis and subsequent work was devoted to Coalgebras, Presheaf Categories, and History Dependent Automata.

My institutional page @ISTI-CNR

Projects

I am currently involved in the following projects:

EU NRPP THE: Tuscany Health Ecosystem. ECS00000017.
NRPP Mission 4, Component 2 Investment 1.5. Finanziato dall'Unionne Europea - NextGenerationEU.
Bilateral Agreements CNR-SRNSF (Georgia) Model Checking for Polyhedral Logics.
CUP B53C23000240005 project no. #CNR-22-010.
MUR PRIN STENDHAL: Spatio-Temporal Enhancement of Neural nets for Deeply Hierarchical Automatised Logic.
Finanziato dall'Unione Europea - NextGenerationEU.
MIUR PRIN IT-MATTERS: Methods and Tools for Trustworthy Smart Systems (finished)

Research interests

My research interests include Formal Methods in Computer Science, Spatial Logics and Spatio-Temporal Model Checking, Automata and Category Theory, Artificial Intelligence, with an accent on pairing solid mathematical theories with usable tools and implementation.

Recently, my interests have been mostly focused on the VoxLogicA project, bringing formally specified expert knowledge to the realm of Medical Imaging via Model checking, in collaboration with colleagues at ISTI-CNR (Giovanna Broccia, Diego Latella, Mieke Massink), at the San Luca Hospital in Lucca (Gina Belmonte) and at the department of Computer Science in Pisa (Laura Bussi, Fabio Gadducci).

VoxLogicA website

Papers

Full list of published papers: @DBLP @CNR (from 2012 on)

Selected recent work:

Davide Basile, Maurice H. ter Beek, Laura Bussi, Vincenzo Ciancia: A toolchain for strategy synthesis with spatial properties. Int. J. Softw. Tools Technol. Transf. 25(5): 641-658 (2023)
Laura Bussi, Vincenzo Ciancia, Fabio Gadducci: A Spatial Logic with Time and Quantifiers. DaLĂ­ 2023: 1-19
Vincenzo Ciancia, Jan Friso Groote, Diego Latella, Mieke Massink, Erik P. de Vink: Minimisation of Spatial Models Using Branching Bisimilarity. FM 2023: 263-281
Vincenzo Ciancia, David Gabelaia, Diego Latella, Mieke Massink, Erik P. de Vink: On Bisimilarity for Polyhedral Models and SLCS. FORTE 2023: 132-151
Nick Bezhanishvili, Vincenzo Ciancia, David Gabelaia, Gianluca Grilletti, Diego Latella, Mieke Massink: Geometric Model Checking of Continuous Space. Log. Methods Comput. Sci. 18(4) (2022)
Giovanna Broccia, Vincenzo Ciancia, Diego Latella, Mieke Massink: Towards a GUI for Declarative Medical Image Analysis: Cognitive and Memory Load Issues. HCI (38) 2022: 103-111
Laura Bussi, Vincenzo Ciancia, Fabio Gadducci: Towards a Spatial Model Checker on GPU. FORTE 2021: 188-196
Gina Belmonte, Giovanna Broccia, Vincenzo Ciancia, Diego Latella, Mieke Massink: Feasibility of Spatial Model Checking for Nevus Segmentation. FormaliSE@ICSE 2021: 1-12
Vincenzo Ciancia, Gina Belmonte, Diego Latella, Mieke Massink: A Hands-On Introduction to Spatial Model Checking Using VoxLogicA - - Invited Contribution. SPIN 2021: 22-41
Vincenzo Ciancia, Yde Venema: Omega-Automata: A Coalgebraic Perspective on Regular omega-Languages. CALCO 2019: 5:1-5:18
Gina Belmonte, Vincenzo Ciancia, Diego Latella, Mieke Massink: VoxLogicA: A Spatial Model Checker for Declarative Image Analysis. TACAS (1) 2019: 281-298

Tools

VoxLogicA: a model checker for 2D and 3D (voxel-based) images, mostly targeted to medical imaging. In its repository, also more experimental tools are available: a variant for generic graphs, one for polyhedra (joint work with Nick Bezhanisvili, David Gabelaia, Gianluca Grilletti, Diego Latella, Mieke Massink), and a GPU-based implementation (joint work with Laura Bussi, Fabio Gadducci)

Topochecker: a topological model checker. Can verify spatio-temporal systems where space is described either by (evolving) images or by graphs.