Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Manu Sridharan (Samsung Research) - Analysis Tools for Reliable Software Everywhere

Speaker: Manu Sridharan, Samsung Research America

Talk Title: Analysis Tools for Reliable Software Everywhere

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium

Software is becoming ubiquitous in everyday life, from today's
smartphones and servers to tomorrow's self-driving cars, drones, and Internet of Things devices. However, the distributed, always-on nature of this software poses significant new challenges for reliability, security, and programmer productivity. Better programming tools are needed to enable next-generation applications to achieve their full transformative potential. I have helped design and develop several such tools in my recent research based on novel techniques in program analysis.

This talk will focus on EventRacer, the first tool for discovering and debugging non-determinism errors in event-driven programs. Event-driven programming has recently achieved a meteoric rise in popularity, as it is well-suited to the needs of modern interactive, client-server applications. However, event-driven programs often suffer from timing-based data races that can be fiendishly difficult to reproduce and debug. EventRacer adapts the notion of a "happens-before relation" from concurrent and distributed systems to give a clean definition of data races for event-driven programs. It also incorporates multiple novel techniques to achieve scalability and usability for real-world applications. With EventRacer, we found many errors in deployed Fortune 100 web sites, and its techniques have since been applied in a variety of other emerging domains.

Biography: Manu Sridharan is a senior researcher at Samsung Research America in the area of programming languages and software engineering. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007, and he worked as a research staff member at IBM Research from 2008-2013. His research has drawn on, and contributed to, techniques in static analysis, dynamic analysis, and program synthesis, with applications to security, software quality, code refactoring, and software performance. His work has been incorporated into multiple commercial products, including IBM's commercial security analysis tool and Samsung's developer toolkit for the Tizen operating system. For further details, see http://manu.sridharan.net.

Host: CS Department

Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair