Computer Science | Grinnell College

Thursday, October 12, 2017
4:15 p.m. in Science 3821
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Science 3817)

Improving the reliability and security of software with formal methods and automated reasoning is presented by Cesare Tinelli from The University of Iowa.

Producing robust, reliable software, which performs its intended function and is less prone to errors and security vulnerabilities, is becoming more and more important as software comes to control increasingly large and critical aspects of modern society. This talk makes a case for using mathematically rigorous approaches based on formal logic to specify the behavior of safety-critical software and verify its correctness. These methods can reduce automatically large classes of program analysis problems to constraint satisfaction problems in some formal logic, and then solve them with the aid of automatic reasoners for that logic. The talk will give a brief overview of this approach and discuss its recent successes and applications in industry, focusing on research done at the University of Iowa in this area.