[Colloq] Reminder: Hiring Talk, TODAY, 11:45am - Brian Demsky - MIT

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium

Presents:
Brian Demsky
MIT

Who will speak on:
Data Structure Repair

Monday, April 11, 2005
11:45am
366 West Village H
Northeastern University

Abstract:
Programs often make assumptions about the states of the data structures 
that they manipulate.  Errors that cause these data structures to become 
inconsistent can therefore be especially damaging, since inconsistent 
data structures may cause software systems to behave unacceptably or 
even fail
catastrophically.

In this talk, I will present my specification-based approach to data 
structure repair.  In this approach, the developer simply writes a 
declarative specification of the key consistency properties for the data
structures.  My repair algorithm generator then compiles this 
specification to automatically generate a repair algorithm for the data 
structure.  The automatically-generated repair algorithm is guaranteed to
repair the inconsistencies in damaged data structures and to terminate. 
I have evaluated my specification-based repair technique on several 
real-world applications.  These applications include: AbiWord, an open
source word processor; a parallel x86 emulator; CTAS, an air traffic 
control tool; FreeCiv, an online game; and a simplified Linux file 
system. My repair technique successfully enabled these programs to 
execute through otherwise fatal data structure corruption errors.

Host: Matthias Felleisen