The Computing Innovation Fellows Project

Posted on: Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Broad Research Area: Other, Programming Languages / Compilers, Software Engineering

Research Interests:

My research interests center on tools and techniques for building, understanding, and ensuring reliable computational systems. Much of my work centers on finding novel ways of interacting with the programmer to design more precise and practical program analyses to produce more effective programming systems.

The Xisa project is an instance of this approach that infers precise properties of complex data structure manipulations. The novelty of Xisa is that it extracts both the necessary invariants and reasoning rules from executable assertions. This approach allows the developer to focus the analysis to the properties of interest and without using a separate formalism for testing and static analysis.

Another project called Mix looks at an incremental combination of analyses with different precision, such as type checking with symbolic execution. The observation is that with user interaction, an analysis need not prove all the desired properties at once.

Have you ever felt a compiler/analysis tool misunderstood what you meant in your program? The Gradual Programming project examines this disconnect between the intent of a software developer and the meaning of the program according to the language semantics. In the end, we envision a programming system where the developer and tools interact to agree upon the precise meaning of a program.

Contact Information:

e-mail: email obfuscated - click to reveal
phone: (303) 492-8894
web: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~bec/