Program Analysis

News and Announcements

• (01.08.2018) Time and date of seminar talks is changed to Thu, 2 August, 14:00 c.t. in the meeting room of our chair (052-00-017).
• (20.06.2018) All dates below are updated to the currently fixed dates. The talks will take place on Thu, 26 July, 14:00 c.t. in a room still to be announced.
• (16.05.2018) All assigned topics are now listed below. Tentative schedule added.
• (26.04.2018) If you want to participate, please send an email to Marius and Alexander until 7.5.2018. The mail should contain at least three topics that you would be willing to present. You may give priorities for the topics. Also let us know if you have strong preferences on when the seminar talks should be held. (Default is the time given in the course catalog, during the last weeks of the semester.)
  
• Please attend the kickoff meeting to receive all necessary information. The date and location of the kickoff meeting will be announced here shortly.

Process of the seminar

• You participate in the kick-off meeting, where we present the available topics. Feel free to hand in your favorite topic in advance.
  
• You contact the instructors (Marius and Alexander) to obtain a topic. You may suggest three topics from below and provide a priorization for each topic. You may also suggest a topic by yourself, pick one of the suggested topics, or find a topic suitable for you in a discussion with your supervisor.
• You have a meeting with your supervisor in which we discuss relevant literature and develop a very coarse sketch of your talk (deadline: four weeks before your talk).
• You write a proposal in which you explain what you are going to present in your talk, together with an abstract of your talk. You submit your abstract and your proposal via email to your supervisor (deadline: three weeks before your talk).
  
• Your proposal is reviewed by your supervisor and two other participants.
• You write two reviews about other participants' proposals and send them via email to the supervisor (deadline: one week after you received the proposal).
  
• You receive reviews for your proposal (deadline: two weeks before your talk).
  
• You submit your slides via email to your supervisor (deadline: one week before your talk).
• You have a meeting with your supervisor in which you get feedback for your slides.
  
• You give a talk of 30 minutes.
  
• You attend the talks of all other participants.
  

Proposals of the talk

The proposal should consist of around five pages in which you explain what you are going to present in your talk. The proposal may contain e.g.:

• short overview for the reviewers (the reviewers will probably not know your topic)
  
• structure of your talk
• aspects of the topic that you present (why?) and ignore (why?)
• examples occurring in the talk (why these examples? Is there a running example that can be used for demonstration?)
  
• which definitions are presented formally? (why?), which definitions are just mentioned informally? (why?)
• which notation is used? (why?)
  
• which theorems are presented, which of them will be proven (why?), which proofs will be omitted (why?), will you use motivating examples in the proof?

Abstract of the talk

• one paragraph that summarizes what you present in the talk
• We will send an invitation for the seminar to all students and members of our chair. This invitation contains the abstracts of all talks.

The talk

• The goal of your talk is that the audience (master students, familiar with computer science in general, probably no experts in the topic) has the possibility to learn something new about an interesting topic. How well you achieved this goal will determine the grade of your talk.
• In a seminar you have to show that you are able to present some topic to other people. You do not have to show how well you understood the topic for yourself. How well you understood the topic has no direct influence on your grade, but only how well you presented the topic to the audience.
  
• You may use and copy any source of information (but do not forget to cite it). If you think your talk is just a "remix" of existing talks tailored to your audience, you might have done a great job. But do not let yourself be fooled by well-structured and fancy talks found in the web, each talk was tailored to a specific audience.
• If you agree we put your slides on this website. Keep in mind that if you have copied images in your slides this might not be possible anymore (copyright restrictions). Of course, it will not have any effect on your grade whether we may publish your slides or not.

Review of the proposal

• Give a short summary of the talk based on the proposal (to detect misunderstandings right at the start).
• Be generous with your criticism. It is very unlikely that a student will get a bad grade because you revealed some problems in his/her proposal. However, it is very likely that a student will get a better grade if he/she was able to resolve a problem in his/her talk, thanks to your review.
  
• Give reasons for your criticism (e.g., "It is not possible to understand Lemma 2 because term foo was not explained.").  You are also allowed to give your personal opinions, if you do so mark them as such (e.g., "Theorem 1 is very difficult to understand, in my opinion you should give an example first.").
• The following questions might be helpful to write your review

Is the proposal sufficiently well written to be readable?
Is the appearance and structure of the proposal appropriate?
Is the comprehensibility of the talk supported by relevant examples and figures?
Is the proposed structure of the talk sensible and balanced?
Are all propositions made by the author correct?
Is the line of reasoning concerning the presentation complete and accurate?
Has the author argued his/her case effectively?
Does the author use the common notation and terminology? Where would you suggest something different?
Is the schedule of the author sensible? Do you think the talk will fit into the 30 min time slot?

Grade

Your overall grade will be composed according to the following proportion.

• 10% grade of your proposal
• 20% grade of your reviews
  
• 70% grade of your talk

Topics

There is not a one-to-one correspondence between seminar talks and topics. Several students may give talks on the same topic, but present different aspects. The suggested literature should give you a first impression of the topics. We assign the exact literature in cooperation with you after you stated your preferences for the topic. More literature does not mean more reading, just more options. The order of appearance is arbitrary.

If requested, some topics may also be presented in groups of two.

Some of the papers are only available via the network of our university (e.g., via vpn). If you have some problem accessing the papers, please ask us.

Commutativity Conditions

• Automatic Generation of Precise and Useful Commutativity Conditions (Kshitij Bansal, Eric Koskinen, Omer Tripp)
• Daniel
• Talk: Julian L.
• Group 1

Invariant Synthesis I

• Houdini, an Annotation Assistant for ESC/Java (Cormac Flanagan, K. Rustan M. Leino)
• Daniel
• Talk: Daniel T.
• Group 1

Unassigned Topics

Introduction to Software Model Checking

Present the mathematical framework and the basic approaches of software model checking (predicate abstraction, CEGAR)

• Literature: tba

• Supervisor: Matthias

Program transformation

Arrays are hard to verify. Therefore convert programs with arrays into a program without arrays.

Literature: SAS '15

Supervisor: Matthias

Program Verification by Coinduction

• Program Verification by Coinduction (Brandon Moore, Lucas Peña, Grigore Rosu)
• Daniel

Invariant Synthesis II

• ICE: A Robust Framework for Learning Invariants (Pranav Garg, Christof Löding, P. Madhusudan, Daniel Neider)
• Daniel

Invariant Synthesis III

• Invariant Synthesis for Incomplete Verification Engines (Daniel Neider, P. Madhusudan, Pranav Garg, Shambwaditya Saha and Daejun Park)
• Daniel

Loop Shrinking

• Property Checking Array Programs Using Loop Shrinking (Shrawan Kumar, Amitabha Sanyal, R. Venkatesh, Punit Shah)
• Daniel

Abstract counterexamples

• Literature: STTT '07
• Christian

Counterexample analysis

• Literature: ATVA '06
• Christian

Abstract Interpretation (Introduction)

Bounded Abstract Interpretation

• Literature: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-662-53413-7_6

• Marius

Schedule

Each topic/talk will get a slot number assigned. We have two slots in total.

The following table contains the deadlines for the groups. Please note that "Review" stands for the review deadline for the specific group's proposals. Each student has to write reviews for two other students.

The times are still to be announced.