Byron Cook: Proving program termination with F#

In recent years we have seen great progress made in the area of automatic source-level static analysis tools. However, most of today’s program verification tools are limited to properties that guarantee the absence of bad events (safety properties). Until now no formal software analysis tool has provided fully automatic support for proving properties that ensure that good events eventually happen (liveness properties).

In this talk, Dr Byron Cook presents such a tool, which handles liveness properties of large systems written in C. Liveness properties are described in an extension of the specification language used in the SDV system. We have used the tool to automatically prove critical liveness properties of Windows device drivers and found several previously unknown liveness bugs.

Dr Byron Cook (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/bycook/) is a principal researcher at Microsoft's laboratory at Cambridge University (http://www.cam.ac.uk/) where he leads the Verification and Automated Reasoning Group (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/varg/). Byron is also full professor of computer science at Queen Mary, University of London (http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~byron/).

Byron's research interests include program analysis/verification, programming languages, theorem proving, logic, hardware design, and operating systems. Byron's recent work has been focused on the development of automatic tools for

· Proving properties of biological models (together with Jasmin Fisher (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/jfisher/))

·Termination and liveness proving (See TERMINATOR (http://research.microsoft.com/terminator/) and a recent Scientfic American article (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=5&articleID=D3EBDC43-E7F2-99DF-3DF7AF0D38DBCA84)),

· Discovering invariants regarding mutable data structures (See the SLAyer (http://research.microsoft.com/slayer) project).

Register on Skills Matter for this Meetup: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/fsharp-research/js-1603