weaselhat

Who will you work with?

Me and my students, naturally! But also Stevens has about thirty research faculty, and we’re growing fast. We have a great group of people interested in PL, security, and systems: Eduardo Bonelli, Tegan Brennan, Dominic Duggan, Will Eiers, Eric Koskinen, Philippe Meunier, David Naumann, Susanne Wetzel, and Xiaodong Yu.

When is synthesis not worthwhile?

We’ve seen three examples of program synthesis that have clearly provided value in the real world. Flash Fill, Fiat Cryptography, and RLIBM are clearly worthwhile.

What’s hard about KAT?

On its own, KAT proves plenty of nice theorems, but none of them reason about particular program behaviors. In the code snippet above, xGt0, incY, and decX are uninterpreted—there’s no relationship between, say xGt0 and decX. That is, you might expect that ¬xGt0;decX;¬xGt0 is equivalent to ¬xGt0;decX, because decrementing a number less than or equal to 0 will yield a number that is also less than or equal to 0.

What’s the catch?

There’s more than one way to cook a KAT. KMT generates KATs with tracing semantics, i.e., the exact trace of actions matters. In KAT+B! or NetKAT, later