Joey Dodds will present his FPO, "Computation Improves Interactive Symbolic Execution," on Thursday, 9/10/2015 at 10:00 AM, CS 302. The members of his committee are: Andrew Appel (adviser); Readers: David Walker, Jesper Bengtson(IT University of Copenhagen); Nonreaders: Sharad Malik, Aarti Gupta A copy of his thesis is available in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. The talk title and abstract follow below: ________________________________________________________ "Computation Improves Interactive Symbolic Execution" As it becomes more prevalant throughout our lives, correct software is more important than it has ever been before. Verifiable C is an expressive Hoare logic (higher-order impredicative concurrent separation logic) for proving functional correctness of C programs. The program logic is foundational—it is proved sound in Coq w.r.t. the operational semantics of CompCert Clight. Users apply the program logic to C programs using semiautomated tactics in Coq, but these tactics are very slow. This thesis shows how to make an efficient (yet still foundational) symbolic executor based on this separation logic by using computational reflection in several different ways. Our execution engine is able to interact gracefully with the user by reflecting application-specific proof goals back to the user for interactive proof—necessary in functional correctness proofs where there is almost always domain-specific reasoning to be done. We use our “mostly sound” type system, computationally efficient finite-map data structures, and the MirrorCore framework for computationally reflected logics. Measurements show a 40× performance improvement.