Inferring Annotations from Verification Histories Monday, April 18, 2016 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm 1240 CS Akash Lal Microsoft Research India Finding invariants is an important step in automated program analysis. Discovery of precise invariants, however, can be very difficult in practice. The problem can be simplified if one has access to a candidate set of predicates (or annotations) and the search for invariants is limited over the space defined by these annotations.
We present an approach that infers program annotations automatically by leveraging the history of verifying related programs. Our algorithm extracts high-quality annotations from previous verification attempts, and then applies them for verifying new programs. We present a case study where we applied our techniques to Microsoft's Static Driver Verifier (SDV).
SDV currently uses manually-tuned heuristics for obtaining a set of annotations. Our techniques not only can replace the need for this manual effort, they even outperform these heuristics and improve the performance of SDV overall.
Speaker's Bio: Akash Lal is a Researcher at Microsoft Research India, which he joined in 2009 after receiving his Ph.D. from the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For his thesis, he was a co-recipient of both the UW CS Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award and the ACM SIGPLAN Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. In 2011, Akash was named to MIT Technology Review's 2011 India TR-35 list (top innovators under 35). |