Prof. Dr. Guido Salvaneschi
Head of the Programming Group
guido.salvaneschi@unisg.ch

School of Computer Science
Office 64-114
Torstrasse 25
9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland

“Where should I go?” – Alice.
“That depends on where you want to end up.” – The Cheshire Cat.
— Lewis Carroll

Welcome to the Programming Group! We are part of the Institute of Computer Science (ICS) at the University of St. Gallen (HSG). Together we enjoy working on Programming Languages and Software Engineering, including languages and architectures for Distributed Systems, Reactive Programming, DevOps Organizations, and Secure Software Systems.

Talk to us or join our group when you are interested in these topics or our work. Students at the University of St. Gallen, please find our courses, theses, and jobs.

Dr. Matteo Biagiola

MSc Christoph Bühler

MSc Jahrim Gabriele Cesario

Dr. Luca Di Grazia

Amelia Gasser (HiWi)

MSc Paul-Philipp Luley (HiWi)

MSc David Spielmann

MSc Alexander Städing

Dr. Pascal Weisenburger

MSc George Zakhour

News

Sep 2025	Prof. Davide Ancona from the University of Genoa is visiting our group.
Sep 2025	Prof. Guido Salvaneschi presented the lecture “Taming the Distributed Systems Beast with Programming Languages” at the DARE 2025 Summer School.
Sep 2025	Our overview paper for the CAPE Horizon project got accepted for publishing.
Aug 2025	PhD Luca Di Grazia joined our group 👋
Jun 2025	Our paper Hybrid Fuzzing of Infrastructure as Code Programs is accepted at FUZZING ‘25 co-located with ISSTA/FSE 2025 🎉 See you in Trondheim in June 🇳🇴
Mar 2025	PhD student Nicolas Farabegoli from University of Bologna is visiting the group for three months!
Mar 2025	MSc Timo Streule, MSc Paul-Philipp Luley, and BSc Alessio Fabio Brazerol joined our group as student researchers 👋
Feb 2025	PhD Matteo Biagiola joined our group 👋
Jan 2025	Our paper TerraDS: A Dataset for Terraform HCL Programs is accepted at MSR ‘25, data and tool showcase track 🎉 See you in Ottawa in April 🇨🇦
Nov 2024	Our paper Dis/Equality Graphs is accepted at POPL ‘25, research track 🎉 See you in Denver 🇺🇸

Projects

Type-checking for CRDTs, tracking algebraic properties in types.

Automated unit testing of Infrastructure as Code programs.

Safe mixing of consistency levels for replicated objects.

Infrastructure as Code for decentralized deployment automation.

MetaverCE: A demonstration of Cloud Engineering in the Metaverse.

J_E

Language-level abstractions for secure programming with Trusted Execution Environments.

A programming language for distributed applications.

Advanced functional reactive programming for the JVM and the Web.

Support

Pre-Deployment Verification of Infrastructure as Code

Project with the Cyber-Defence Campus (CYD). The project contributes to the broader vision of protecting infrastructures from attacks that exploit security vulnerabilities. The project aims to verify infrastructure code before deployment, providing cloud administrators with early insights.

Great Minds Postdoctoral Fellowships

Fellowship support for Dr. Luca Di Grazia, supporting his research on Secure Software in the Age of Massively GenAI-Generated Code.

Consistency Programming for Local First Software

SNF project. Programming abstractions for local-first software, CRDTs, consistency levels, verification of replicated data structures, privacy preserving data pods.

HORIZON-RIA: European Open Compute Architecture for Powerful Edge

A future proof, powerful edge-cloud computing infrastructure, allowing European enterprises to keep control of the processing and management of their data and AI locally and enabling them to easily create a seamless computing experience stretching from edge to cloud.

completed

Multitier Programming above the Clouds

SNF project. Multitier programming for heterogeneous platforms and devices, the cloud, mobile applications, Internet of Things (IoT) software, and Big Data processing stacks.

completed

Systematic Testing of Supply Chain Infrastructure Configuration

Project with the Cyber-Defence Campus (CYD). Modern unit testing techniques to assess IaC programs in numerous configurations, to detect configuration errors and uncover dependencies that may lead to system vulnerabilities.

completed

DFG SFB. Cryptography-Based Security Solutions. Secure cryptography-based software for next generation computing environments.

completed

International Postdoctoral Fellowship

Fellowship support for Dr. Pascal Weisenburger, supporting his research on multitier programming languages.

completed

LOEWE project. Emergency Responsive Digital Cities: Resilient software infrastructures to protect smart cities from disasters.

completed

National center for applied cybersecurity. Mission: Decentralized Cybersecurity. Application-oriented cybersecurity for business, society and government.

completed

Distributed Systems Development with MT and RP

DFG Individual Research Program. Distributed Systems Development with Multitier Reactive Programming. High-level language abstractions for developing distributed software systems.

completed

MAKI

DFG SFB. Event-Based Communication in Programmable Networks. Adaptation, interaction and optimization of communication systems.

completed

Software-Factory 4.0

LOEWE project. Engineering software systems for high performance computing (HPC) using modern smart technology.

completed

ReDOOP

DFG Individual Research Program. Reactive Design for Object Oriented Programming.