abstract: Software-dependent critical systems that impact daily life are rapidly increasing in number, size, and complexity. Unfortunately, inadequate software and systems engineering can lead to accidents that cause economic disaster, injuries, or even death. There is a growing reliance on development and verification tools to reduce costs, better manage complexity, and to increase confidence in […]

abstract: Modern verification techniques are becoming ever-more powerful and sophisticated, and building tools to implement them is a time-consuming and difficult task. Writing a new verifier to validate each on-paper approach is impractical; for this reason intermediate verification languages such as Boogie and Why3 have become popular over the last decade for implementing research from […]

abstract: Since the ideas were first published in 1981, verifiable election technologies have undergone decades of research successes and deployment failures. This talk will trace the history of these technologies, their evolution, and the practical challenges that they have faced. We’ll then look forward at the potential for near-term successes and the public benefits that […]

abstract: Interrupt-driven software is difficult to test and debug, especially when interrupts can be nested and subject to priorities. Interrupts can arrive at arbitrary times, leading to an explosion in the number of cases to be considered. We present a new formal approach to verifying interrupt-driven software based on symbolic execution. The approach leverages recent […]

slides: goo.gl/MtQmas abstract: Why is cybersecurity such a hard problem? The US government, its citizens, and the organizations that write software are all on the same team, but in many cases, our interests are just not aligned. For instance, there have been endless political and social disagreements about the best way to share cyber threat […]

abstract: CH2O is the PhD project of Robbert Krebbers and has as its goal a formal version of the ISO standard of the C programming language. A problem with this is that the C standard is fundamentally inconsistent. There are three versions of the CH2O semantics: a (small step) operational semantics, an executable semantics, and […]

abstract: In this talk, I’ll give an introduction to differential privacy with an emphasis on its relationship to machine learning, and its usefulness outside of privacy. Along the way, I’ll give a taste for the mathematical tools that can be used to achieve differential privacy. My thesis is that anyone who cares about data should […]

abstract: Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) is a student aerospace engineering project at Portland State University. We’re building ultra-low-cost, open source rockets that feature some of the most sophisticated amateur rocket avionics systems anywhere. Learn some of the history of the group, why steering a rocket is very, very hard, and what we’re doing to […]

abstract: For the last several years, speed improvements in computing come mainly from increasing parallelism. Imperative programming, however, makes parallelization very difficult due to the many possible dependencies implied by effects. For decades, pure functional programming has held the promise of parallel execution while retaining the very simple semantics that enables practical, rigorous reasoning. This […]

abstract: Jesse has been using Rust to write a PAM module. He will tell us about what he has learned about working with Rust, and about getting Rust’s lifetime-checking to mesh with external C functions. bio: Jesse Hallett is a research engineer at Galois. He has extensive experience in web and high-level programming; but has […]