Automating Abstract Interpretation

Abstract

[evdate 2016-01-05] IAS distinguished lecture. Title from opening screen.

Abstract: In this talk, the speaker describes a twenty-year quest to address this issue by raising the level of automation in abstract interpretation. He also present several different approaches to creating correct-by-construction analyzers. Somewhat surprisingly, this research has recently allowed the speaker's group to establish connections between the problem and several other areas of computer science, including decision procedures, machine learning, knowledge compilation, data integration, and constraint programming.

Prof Thomas Reps received his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1982 and joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985. He is currently the J. Barkley Rosser Professor & Rajiv and Ritu Batra Chair in the Computer Sciences Department there.

Prof Reps’s research focuses on a wide variety of topics, including program slicing, dataflow analysis, pointer analysis, model checking, computer security, code instrumentation, language-based program-development environments, the use of program profiling in software testing, software renovation, incremental algorithms, and attribute grammars.

Prof Reps received numerous awards including NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1986), a Packard Fellowship (1988), a Humboldt Research Award (2000), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2000). He was also elected as an ACM Fellow (2005). In 2013, Prof Reps was elected a foreign member of Academia Europaea.

Duration: 87 min.