Christine Rizkallah

Christine contributes checkable proofs for algorithms and tools aimed at making software verification more practical. The Burrows–Wheeler work verifies both a transformation used in compression and pattern searching and the operation that reverses it, making the proof publicly available for inspection and reuse. Work on testing, research supervision and conference leadership also supports the community developing stronger ways to assess software correctness.

Christine Rizkallah is Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne, focusing on making interactive theorem provers easier to use when verifying software. Earlier doctoral research at Saarland University and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics investigated the verification of program computations, followed by research and academic appointments at Data61, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of New South Wales.

In work spanning algorithms, programming languages, security and systems, Christine collaborated with Louis Cheung to contribute a machine-checked formalisation of the Burrows–Wheeler transform and its inverse to the Archive of Formal Proofs in 2025. The public proof provides an inspectable foundation for reasoning about the correctness of the algorithm. Other projects include a Cogent testing framework and domain-specific languages designed to reduce the effort of verifying software.

A 2023 keynote at the International Conference on Functional Programming shared the Cogent and Dargent approach to trustworthy systems development. Christine also supports the wider programming languages community through doctoral supervision and conference leadership, including diversity and inclusion service.