Abbas' research interests span the design, control and verification of cyber-physical systems, with particular emphasis on autonomous systems, like self-driving cars and drones, and medical devices. In particular, he is interested in the development of light-weight verification techniques that can run on-board autonomous systems and their dual use for control. He is also investigating distributed control algorithms for complex aerial missions. On the medical side, he is currently investigating programming languages suited for programming resource-constrained medical devices, and developing theoretical guarantees on their energy use.