- talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

Wed. Dec 12th: Shaz Qadeer: "Taming Concurrency: A Program Verification Perspective"
by David Walker 07 Dec '07

07 Dec '07

December 12th (next Wednesday) Shaz Qadeer from Microsoft research is visiting Princeton. He is an expert in analysis of concurrent programs and will be giving a distinguished lecture entitled "Taming Concurrency: A Program Verification Perspective". If you would like to meet with him (faculty or students), please pick a timeslot on Wednesday and put yourself on his schedule by editing this file: ~dpw/qadeer His abstract and bio are list below. Thanks, Dave ********************************************************** * Taming Concurrency: A Program Verification Perspective * * Shaz Qadeer * * Microsoft Research * ********************************************************** Concurrency, as a basic primitive for software construction, is more relevant today than ever before, primarily due to the multi-core revolution. General-purpose software applications must find ways to exploit concurrency explicitly in order to take advantage of multiple cores. However, experience has shown that explicitly parallel programs are difficult to get right. To deliver compelling software products in the multi-core era, we must improve our ability to reason about concurrency. Generalizing well-known sequential reasoning techniques to concurrent programs is fundamentally difficult because of the possibility of interference among concurrently-executing tasks. In this lecture, I will present reduction and context-bounding, two ideas that alleviate the difficulty of reasoning about interference by creating a simpler view of a concurrent execution than an interleaving of thread instructions. Reduction reduces interference by making a sequence of instructions in a thread appear as a single atomic instruction; it allows the programmer to view an execution as a sequence of large atomic instructions. Context-bounding reduces interference by focusing on executions with a small number of context switches; it allows the programmer to view an execution as a sequence of large thread contexts. I will present the theory behind these two approaches and their realization in a number of program verification tools I have developed over the years. Bio: Shaz Qadeer is a researcher in the Software Reliability Research group at Microsoft Research. The goal of his research is to develop tools for improving the productivity of programmers. He has worked on many program verification tools, spanning the range from run-time verification to model checking to static analysis, with an emphasis on tools for concurrent programs. Shaz received his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and worked at Compaq Systems Research Center before joining Microsoft Research.

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Talk is starting now
by Ginny Hogan 29 Nov '07

29 Nov '07

Nancy Baym's talk, Understanding the Network Audience, is starting now - Computer Science Room 105

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Cookies -
by Ginny Hogan 29 Nov '07

29 Nov '07

Cookies and goodies are now available in the tea room -

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Speaker Today
by Ginny Hogan 29 Nov '07

29 Nov '07

Nancy Baym will present her talk "Understanding the Networked Audience", today at 4:30pm" Computer Science Room 105 Tea will be at 3:30.

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Nancy Baym's Talk is Thursday
by Ginny Hogan 26 Nov '07

26 Nov '07

Previous mail has Nancy Talk on Wed. It is Thursday at 4:30pm - Computer Science Room 105 -

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Speaker Wednesday
by Ginny Hogan 26 Nov '07

26 Nov '07

Nancy Baym, University of Kansas, will present her talk, "Understanding The Networked Audience" Wed. Nov 29th 4:15PM, Computer Science Room 105 -

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K Makarychev FPO
by Melissa M Lawson 19 Nov '07

19 Nov '07

Konstantin Makarychev will present his FPO on Tuesday November 27 at 3PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Moses Charikar, advisor; Boaz Barak and Assaf Naor (NYU), readers; Bernard Chazelle and Bob Tarjan, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Quadratic Forms on Graphs and their Applications", is on display in room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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C Myers FPO - change of location
by Melissa M Lawson 16 Nov '07

16 Nov '07

Chad's FPO has been moved from the CS building to room 280, Carl Icahn Labs. The date and time remain the same - Wednesday November 21, 10AM. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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LOCATION CHANGE Monday Nov 19: Gang Tan
by Andrew W. Appel 15 Nov '07

15 Nov '07

Change of location (ROOM 402) for Gang Tan's talk this coming Monday noon. Note that we will start promptly at noon, to leave time for a talk at 1:30 (in 301) by Stephanie Weirich of U. Penn, on "Engineering Formal Metatheory". Location: Computer Science room 402 Monday, Nov 19th. Time: 12 noon. LUNCH PROVIDED (for the first 20 people...) Speaker: Gang Tan, Boston College Title: Security Analysis of the Native Code in the JDK Abstract: It is well known that the use of native methods in Java defeats Java's guarantees of safety and security, which is why the default policy of Java applets, for example, cannot load non-local native code. However, there is already a large amount of trusted native C/C++ code that comprises a significant portion of the Java Development Kit (JDK). We have carried out an empirical study on the security of the native code in Sun's JDK 1.6. By applying static analysis tools and manual inspection, we have identified in this security-critical code previously undiscovered vulnerabilities. We propose a taxonomy of vulnerabilities to classify patterns of errors, and discuss new patterns that arise in the interaction between Java and the native code. We also discuss remedies to address the threats posed by the native code. We have implemented a system, SafeJNI, which can guarantee that the failure of the native code does not corrupt the Java state. We have also proposed ILEA, which is a general framework for performing inter-language analysis across Java and C. By partially compiling C code into Java code, ILEA enables existing analyses on Java to also understand the C code.

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C Myers FPO
by Melissa M Lawson 15 Nov '07

15 Nov '07

Chad Myers will present his FPO on Wednesday November 21 at 10AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Olga Troyanskaya, advisor; Kai Li and David Botstein (Genomics Inst), readers; S.Y. Kung (ELE) and Leonid Kruglyak (MOL), nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Context-sensitive Methods for Learning from Genomic Data" is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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