PhD positions in concurrency/distribution/verification at ETH






As part of our “Concurrency Made Easy” ERC Advanced Investigator Grant project (2012-2017), we are offering PhD positions at the Chair of Software Engineering of ETH Zurich. The goal of the project is to build a sophisticated programming and verification architecture to make concurrent and distributed programming simple and reliable, based on the ideas of … Read more




Negative variables: new version






I have mentioned this paper before (see the earlier blog entry here) but it is now going to be published [1] and has been significantly revised, both to take referee comments into account and because we found better ways to present the concepts. We have  endeavored to explain better than in the draft why the … Read more




Saint Petersburg Software Engineering Seminar: 14 January 2014 (6 PM)






There will be two talks in the Software Engineering Seminar at ITMO, 18:00 local time, Tuesday, January 14, 2014. Please arrive 10 minutes early for registration. Place: ITMO, Sytninskaya Ulitsa, Saint Petersburg. Andrey Terekhov (SPBGU): Programming crystals (I do not know whether this talk will be in Russian or English. An abstract follows but the … Read more




New paper: alias calculus and frame inference






For a while now I have  been engaged in  a core problem of software verification: the aliasing problem. As with many difficult problems in science, it is easy to state the basic question: can we determine automatically whether at a program point p the values of two reference expressions e and f can ever denote … Read more




The invariants of key algorithms (new paper)






  I have mentioned this paper before but as a draft. It has now been accepted by ACM’s Computing Surveys and is scheduled to appear in September 2014; the current text, revised from the previous version, is available [1]. Here is the abstract: Software verification has emerged as a key concern for ensuring the continued … Read more




Reading notes: strong specifications are well worth the effort






  This report continues the series of ICSE 2013 article previews (see the posts of these last few days, other than the DOSE announcement), but is different from its predecessors since it talks about a paper from our group at ETH, so you should not expect any dangerously delusional,  disingenuously dubious or downright deceptive declaration … Read more




Reading notes: misclassified bugs






  (Please note the general disclaimer [1].) How Misclassification Impacts Bug Prediction [2], an article to be presented on Thursday at ICSE, is the archetype of today’s successful empirical software engineering research, deriving significant results from the mining of publicly available software project repositories — in this case Tomcat5 and three others from Apache, as well … Read more




Reading notes: the design of bug fixes






  To inaugurate the “Reading Notes” series [1] I will take articles from the forthcoming International Conference on Software Engineering. Since I am not going to ICSE this year I am instead spending a little time browsing through the papers, obligingly available on the conference site. I’ll try whenever possible to describe a paper before … Read more




Specify less to prove more






Software verification is progressing slowly but surely. Much of that progress is incremental: making the fundamental results applicable to real programs as they are built every day by programmers working in standard circumstances. A key condition is to minimize the amount of annotations that they have to provide. The article mentioned in my previous post, … Read more