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[PAST EVENT] Distinguished Speaker: Mary Lou Soffa, University of Virginia
October 7, 2011
3pm - 5pm
One of the important challenges of developing software is the avoidance of software faults. Since a fault occurs along an execution path, program path information is essential for both detecting and diagnosing a fault. Manual inspection can identify a path where a fault occurs; however, the approach does not scale. Dynamic techniques, such as testing, are also effective to find faulty paths, but only in a sampled space. In this talk, I will describe our research that is developing a practical, path-based framework that statically detects and then helps in diagnosing software faults. The techniques are path-based in that both detecting and reporting faults use path information. A demand-driven analysis that effectively addresses scalability challenges faced by traditional path-sensitive analyses is described. The usefulness of the path information is demonstrated for computing fault correlation, a causal relationship between faults, and for guiding software testing to exploit faults. The generality of the framework is based on a specification technique that can express different types of faults and a technique that automatically generates path-based analyses for user-specified faults.
Bio:
Mary Lou Soffa is the Owen R. Cheatham Professor and Department Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia. From 1977 to 2004, she was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh and also served as the Dean of Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences from 1991 to 1996. Her research interests include optimizing compilers, virtual execution environments, software testing, program analysis, software security, instruction level parallelism and multi-core architectures.
Soffa was elected an ACM Fellow in 1999 and received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring the same year. She was selected as a Girl Scout Woman of Distinction in 2003 and received the Computing Research Association (CRA) Nico Habermann Award in 2006. She has served on the Executive Committees of both ACM SIGSOFT and SIGPLAN, as well as conference chair, program chair or program committee member of numerous conferences. She had directed 26 Ph.D. students to completion, half of whom are women, and over 60 M.S. students. She currently serves on the ACM Publication Board and was elected in 2008 to serve on the ACM Executive Committee.
Bio:
Mary Lou Soffa is the Owen R. Cheatham Professor and Department Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia. From 1977 to 2004, she was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh and also served as the Dean of Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences from 1991 to 1996. Her research interests include optimizing compilers, virtual execution environments, software testing, program analysis, software security, instruction level parallelism and multi-core architectures.
Soffa was elected an ACM Fellow in 1999 and received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring the same year. She was selected as a Girl Scout Woman of Distinction in 2003 and received the Computing Research Association (CRA) Nico Habermann Award in 2006. She has served on the Executive Committees of both ACM SIGSOFT and SIGPLAN, as well as conference chair, program chair or program committee member of numerous conferences. She had directed 26 Ph.D. students to completion, half of whom are women, and over 60 M.S. students. She currently serves on the ACM Publication Board and was elected in 2008 to serve on the ACM Executive Committee.
Contact
Department of Computer Science