Modelling and Verification using Automata Learning
Professor Alexandra Silva leads this year’s Needham lecture, she is the 2018 BCS Roger Needham award winner.
This lecture is sponsored by Microsoft.
OUR SPEAKERS
Headline Speaker: Professor Alexandra Silva
Introductory Speaker: Professor Bart Jacobs
Vote of thanks: Professor Peter O'Hearn, UCL and Facebook
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AGENDA
17:45-18:30 - Registration with tea/coffee
18:30 - Lecture commences
20:00 - End of lecture
20:00-21:00 - Networking buffet and drinks reception (optional)
21:00 - Close
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SYNOPSIS
Automata are one of the simplest and pervasive structures in Computer Science. Despite their simplicity, automata play an important role in many tasks notably in modelling and verification of hardware and software systems.
In this talk, I will describe how automata learning algorithms can be used to model and verify different systems and protocols. I will discuss the challenges that we need to overcome to bring this technique to mainstream hardware (and software) verification.
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SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Headline Speaker: Professor Alexandra Silva
Alexandra Silva is a theoretical computer scientist whose main research focuses on semantics of programming languages and modular development of algorithms for computational models. A lot of her work uses the unifying perspective offered by coalgebra, a mathematical framework established in the last decades.
Alexandra is currently a Royal Society Wolfson fellow and Professor of Algebra, Semantics, and Computation at University College London. Previously, she was an assistant professor in Nijmegen and a post-doc at Cornell University, with Prof. Dexter Kozen, and a PhD student at the Dutch national research centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), under the supervision of Prof. Jan Rutten and Dr. Marcello Bonsangue.
She was the recipient of the Presburger Award 2017, the Leverhulme prize 2016, and an ERC starting Grant in 2015.
Introductory Speaker: Bart Jacobs
Bart Jacobs is a professor of computer security at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His work covers both theoretical computer science and more practical, multidisciplinary work, especially in computer
security and privacy. Jacobs is a member of the Academia Europaea and of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, and a recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant. He is an active participant in societal debates about security and privacy, in the media and in various advice roles e.g. for government and parliament. He chairs a non-profit spin-off on attribute-based identity management
(https://privacybydesign.foundation/en/).
For more information, see: http://www.cs.ru.nl/~bart/
Vote of thanks: Peter O'Hearn
Peter O'Hearn is a computer scientist who has made major contributions to the science and engineering of program correctness. His research contains a strand stretching from abstract topics such as mathematical logics through to automated analysis of industrial software used regularly by billions of people.
Peter is known particularly for separation logic, a theory he developed with John Reynolds which opened up new possibilities for scaling logical reasoning about code. This built upon prior work of Peter and David Pym on logic for resources. After over 20 years as an academic, Peter took a position at Facebook in 2013 with the acquisition of a startup he cofounded, Monoidics Ltd. The Infer program analyzer, developed by Peter's team, has resulted in tens of thousands of issues being fixed by Facebook engineers before they reach production. Infer is also used at Amazon, Spotify, Mozilla and other companies.
Peter has received a number of awards for his work, including the 2011 POPL Influential Paper Award, the 2016 CAV Award and the 2016 Gödel Prize. Peter is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and he received an honorary doctorate from Dalhousie University in 2018.
