Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are open to the interested public. Please join us!

title:

Large-Scale Static Analysis at Mozilla (slides, video)

presenter:

Taras Glek

time:

10:30 am, 8 June 2010, Tuesday

location:

Galois Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)

abstract:

A competitive browser market requires fast-paced improvements to the codebase. Such improvements may require significant refactoring of large parts of the codebase. Mozilla Firefox is one of the largest open source C++ projects. Unfortunately C++ is a complex language: method overloading, virtual functions, template instantiation, pointer arithmetic, etc reduce developer productivity. Mozilla developed C++ static analysis and refactoring tools to increase developer leverage in C++. Static analysis is done via Dehydra/Treehydra GCC plugins and refactoring is accomplished by extending the Elsa C++ parser. This talk will discuss why Mozilla needs static analysis, why there are so few tools for C++, and specific projects that we’ve embarked on.

bio:

Taras Glek is a software engineer at Mozilla Corporation. He works on static analysis and startup performance. Taras blogs about it at http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/.

Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are open to the interested public. Please join us!IMPORTANT: Please note that this talk is Thursday.

title:

Categories are Databases (slides, video)

presenter:

Dr. David Spivak

time:

10:30 am, 03 June 2010, Thursday

location:

Galois Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)

abstract:

Category theory is a powerful language for organizing layers of abstraction in all areas of mathematics. Databases are powerful tools for organizing information of all sorts. Whereas categories are often considered hopelessly abstract, databases are often considered horrifically mundane. Thus it is either strange or fitting that, mathematically speaking, categories and databases are the same concept. In this talk I’ll show how to turn any database into a category and any category into a database. I’ll also discuss functors and how they may be useful for issues of data migration and merging.

bio:

David Spivak graduated with a PhD in mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2007; his thesis used higher category theory to fix an old problem in geometry. From 2007 to the present, he have been a postdoc at the University of Oregon in the Math Department. During this time, his focus has moved toward the idea of using category theory to understand information and communication.  This summer, he will become a mathematics postdoc at MIT for three years, focusing on information and communication from a category-theoretic perspective.

Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are open to the interested public. Please join us!

IMPORTANT: Please note that this talk is Monday.

title:

The L4.verified Project

presenter:

Dr. Gerwin Klein

time:

10:30 am, 24 May 2010, Monday

location

Galois Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)

abstract:

Last year, the NICTA L4.verifed project produced a formal machine-checked Isabelle/HOL proof that the C code of the seL4 OS microkernel correctly implements its abstract implementation. This talk will give an overview of the proof together with its main implications and assumptions, and will show in which kinds of systems this formally verified kernel can be used for gaining assurance on overall system security.

bio:

Dr Gerwin Klein is a Principal Researcher at NICTA and Conjoint Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is working in the area of formal software verification, interactive theorem proving, and operating systems. He is the project leader of L4.verified. He received his PhD in 2003 from Technische Universitaet Munich on the topic of Java Bytecode Verification and has been working in the area of machine-checked formal proof in various projects since 1998.

Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are open to the interested public. Please join us!

title

Developing Good Habits for Bare-Metal Programming (slides, video)

presenter

Mark Jones

High Assurance Systems Programming Project (HASP)

Portland State University

time

10:30am, Tuesday, 18 May 2010

location

Galois Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)

abstract

Developers of systems software must often deal with low-level and performance-critical details that are hard to address in high-level programming languages. As a result, much of the systems software that is produced today is written in languages like C and assembly code, without the benefit of more expressive type systems or other features from modern functional programming languages that could help to increase programmer productivity or software quality. In this talk, we present an update on the status of Habit, a dialect of Haskell that we are designing, as part of the HASP project at PSU, to meet the needs of high assurance systems programming. Among other features, Habit provides: mechanisms for fine control over representation of bit-level and memory-based data structures; strong support for both functional and imperative programming; and a flexible type system that allows precise characterization of size and bound information via type level naturals, as well as termination properties resulting from the use of unpointed types.

bio

(from http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/)Mark Jones is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, USA. His interests include all aspects of programming language design, implementation, and application. He is particularly interested in the use of advanced programming language technologies for systems programming, and in the development and application of expressive type and module systems that support the construction and certification of secure and reliable software systems.

Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are open to the interested public. Please join us!The talk will be held atGalois Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)

Typing DirectoriesDetails:

• Presenter: Kathleen Fisher, AT&T Labs
• Date: Monday May 03, 2010
• Time: 3:30pm (NOTE THE CHANGED DATE AND TIME!)

Abstract: PADS describes the contents of individual ad hoc data files, but has no provisions for describing collections of files, i.e., directories. In this talk, I explore examples where having a declarative description of directories as well as files would be useful, including websites, source code trees, source code control systems, operating systems, and scientific data sets. As part of this exploration, I identify essential features of a directory description language and useful tools that might be produced from such a description. I end with a series of questions about how such a language might most easily be implemented in the context of Haskell.This is joint work with David Walker and Kenny Zhu.Bio: (from http://www.research.att.com/people/Fisher_Kathleen_S) Kathleen Fisher is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Labs Research and a Consulting Faculty Member in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.  Kathleen’s research focuses on advancing the theory and practice of programming languages and on applying ideas from the programming language community to the problem of ad hoc data management.  The main thrust of her work has been in domain-specific languages to facilitate programming with massive amounts of ad hoc data, including the Hancock system for efficiently building signatures from massive transaction streams and the PADS system for managing ad hoc data.Kathleen is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.  She has served as program chair for FOOL, CUFP, and ICFP. She is past Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Programming Languages (SIGPLAN), Co-Chair of CRA’s Committee on the Status of Women (CRA-W), and an editor of the Journal of Functional Programming.  She is currently serving on the CRA Board.

Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are open to the interested public. Please join us!The talk will be held atGalois Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)

Visualizing Information Flow through C Programs (slides)

Details:

• Presenter: Joe Hurd
• Date: Tuesday April 27, 2010
• Time: 10:30am

Abstract: The aim of the Automated Security Analysis project is to determine whether the information flows in a realistically-sized C codebase can be automatically deduced and communicated in an understandable way to someone unfamiliar with the code. To test this, a new information flow static analysis and visualization technique were developed, and implemented in a research prototype tool. This talk will present the novel features of the static analysis and demonstrate how the results are shown in the visualization tool: information flow between program storage locations is decomposed into two compositional properties, which can be computed using sound abstract interpretation techniques. For each deduced information flow, the static analysis keeps track of a set of source code locations which demonstrate the information flow, and this is used by the visualization component to communicate the information flow to a user browsing the source code.

Bio: Joe Hurd, Ph.D. is a Formal Methods Engineer at Galois, Inc. For the past ten years Dr. Hurd has been applying theorem proving techniques to formally verify the correctness of complex software, including probabilistic programs, elliptic curve cryptography and game tree analysis algorithms. He is also the developer of Metis, an automatic theorem prover for first order logic, and coordinates the OpenTheory project, a package management system for higher order logic theories. Dr. Hurd is an active member of the theorem proving research community, having organized conferences in 2005 and 2008, given invited talks, and regularly appears on program committees and reviews papers for conferences and journals. Prior to joining Galois in 2007, Dr. Hurd was a research fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He studied at the University of Cambridge, receiving a Masters level degree in Mathematics in 1997, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2002.

The eight queens puzzle asks how to place eight queens on a chess board such that none of them attacks any other. The problem easily generalizes to n queens, using an nxn board. In this post, we’ll see how to solve the n-Queens puzzle in Cryptol, without lifting a finger!

Representing the board

It is easy to see that any solution to the n-Queens puzzle will have precisely one queen on each row and column of the board. Therefore, we can represent the solution as a sequence of n row numbers, corresponding to subsequent columns. For instance, the board pictured below (taken from the wikipedia page), can be represented by the sequence3  7  0  2  5  1  6  4
recording the row of the queen appearing in each consecutive column, starting from the top-left position. (And yes, we always count from 0!)

Please note the non-standard time and day for this talk.Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk.  These talks are open to the interested public.  Please join us!Talks will be held atGalois Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)

Building Refactoring Tools for Functional Languages

Details:

• Presenter: Prof. Simon Thompson
• Date: Thursday, April 1, 2010
• Time: 10:30am

Abstract: Refactoring is the process of changing the design of a program without changing what it does. Typical refactorings, such as function extraction and generalisation, are intended to make a program more amenable to extension, more comprehensible and so on. Refactorings differ from other sorts of program transformation in being applied to source code (rather than within the bowels of a compiler), and in having an effect across a code base. Because of this, there is a need to give (semi-)automated support to the process. This talk will reflect on our experience of building tools to refactor functional programs written in Haskell and Erlang (Wrangler). In doing this we will address system design, the pragmatics of system take-up, as well as contrasting the style of refactoring and tooling for Haskell and Erlang.Bio: Simon Thompson is a Professor of Logic and Computation at the University of Kent.

LATE NOTICE: The Simon Thompson talk has been moved to Thurs. April 1, at 10:30am.Please note the non-standard times for these talks.Galois is pleased to host two tech talks during the week of March 22, 2010.  The two talks are short (20-30 minutes each) talks back-to-back at 10:30am on March 24th. Details are below.Talks will be held atGalois Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)These talks are open to the interested public.  Please join us!

Visualization and Diversity Information

Details:

• Presenter: Prof. Ron Metoyer
• Date: Wednesday, March 24, 2010
• Time: 10:30am

Abstract: The term “diversity’’ is used in many ways in many domains.  People are concerned about the diversity of their work force, stock portfolios, student body, and forest insects, just to name a few.  In this talk, I will discuss a work-in-progress visualization technique specifically designed to communicate diversity information.  I will present the design concerns, resulting visualizations, and a study design for evaluating the method.  I will conclude with a discussion of a case-study application to moth species data.Bio: Ronald Metoyer is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University.  He earned a Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology where he worked in the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center with a focus on modeling and visualizing the motion of pedestrians in urban and architectural scenes.  Dr. Metoyer currently co-directs the NVIDIA Graphics and Imaging Technologies Lab (GAIT) with his colleagues at OSU. His past research efforts have involved the investigation of techniques for manipulating motion capture data and for facilitating the creation of 3D content by end users with the goal of empowering domain experts to create compelling and interactive content for their domain specific needs.  In 2002, he received an NSF CAREER Award for his work in “Understanding the Complexities of Animated Content”.  Dr. Metoyer’s most recent research interests fall under the domain of information visualization.

TITLE: Scientific Data Visualization in a GPU World

Details:

• Presenter: Prof. Mike Bailey
• Date: Wednesday, March 24, 2010
• Time: 11:00am

Abstract: One of the fun aspects of scientific data visualization is that there are no rules — anything that adds insight to the data display is fair game.  Add that to the fun of custom-programming the GPU, and you’ve really got something!This talk will discuss some of the uses of custom GPU programming to create better and more interactive visualization displays.  We will look at techniques in the realm of scalar visualization, vector visualization, volume visualization, and terrain mapping.Bio: Mike Bailey is a Professor in Computer Science at Oregon State University. He specializes in scientific visualization, 3D interactive computer graphics, GPU programming, stereographics, and computer aided geometric design.

Please note the unusual time-slot for this talk!Details:

• Title: An Introduction to Communicating Haskell Processes
• Presenter: Neil Brown
• Date: Monday, 15 March 2010
• Time: 10:30am
• Location: Galois Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)

• View slides online
• Download PDF

Abstract: Haskell is an excellent language for combining the power of functional programming with imperative constructs. This characteristic led to the development of the Communicating Haskell Processes (CHP) libraries, which support imperative synchronous message-passing in Haskell. The core ‘chp’ library provides basic message-passing, concurrency and choice, as well as integrated support for tracing. The ‘chp-plus’ library provides higher-level features such as process composition operators and behaviour combinators. This talk provides an introduction to the two libraries and the programming style they engender — as well as a brief look at the formal semantics underlying the libraries.Bio: Neil Brown is a software researcher from the University of Kent in the UK. After graduating he worked for several years as a machine learning researcher in industry at QinetiQ, before returning to university to undertake his PhD. He started out writing a Haskell-based compiler for synchronous message-passing languages, and ended up programming some synchronous message-passing libraries for Haskell itself. As well as these CHP libraries, he also developed the Progression benchmark-graphing library for Haskell. More detail on both projects can be found on his blog.