Name: Career chat and Tech talk with Professor Alexa VanHattum
Start: 2023-07-13T18:00:00-07:00
End: 2023-07-13T20:00:00-07:00

**Technical Talk: Lightweight, Modular Verification for Instruction Selection**
Language-level guarantees—like runtime isolation for WebAssembly modules—are only as strong as the compiler that produces a native-machine-specific executable. Subtle wrong-code bugs in native instruction selection can introduce serious security flaws. In this talk, I’ll describe VeriISLE, our system for lightweight, modular verification of instruction-lowering rules in Cranelift, a production retargetable WebAssembly code generator. VeriISLE reproduces known bugs (including a 9.9/10 severity security bug) and identifies previously-unknown bugs and underspecified compiler invariants. More broadly, I’ll discuss how integrating lightweight formal methods can free engineers from having to choose between prioritizing efficiency and correctness.

We will then have an Ask Me Anything session where I will be happy to answer questions on my research, the academic job market (especially teaching- and undergraduate-focused positions), and collaboration between academia and industry.

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Alexa VanHattum is an incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College, a historically women’s college and liberal arts college. Her research sits at the intersection of programming languages and systems, with a focus on applying lightweight formal methods to the compiler stack. She recently defended her PhD thesis at Cornell University, where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow advised by Adrian Sampson in the Computer Architecture & Programming Abstractions group. She holds a BS from Brown University and has previously worked on Rust verification at Amazon Web Services and health software at Apple.

Women in Compilers and Tools Meetup Series

Career chat and Tech talk with Professor Alexa VanHattum

Women in Compilers and Tools Meetup Series

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