SKLCS seminar on "Program Verification: a 50-Year History"

Title: Program Verification: a 50-Year History

Abstract: The year 2019 sees the 50th anniversary of Tony Hoare’s CACM paper, “An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming”. In that paper, Hoare stated: “When the correctness of a program, its compiler, and the hardware of the computer have all been established with mathematical certainty, it will be possible to place great reliance on the results of the program, and predict their properties with a confidence limited only by the reliability of the electronics.” In this talk, I will review the 50-year history of this vision, describing the obstacles, the controversies, and progress milestones. I will conclude with the description of both impressive progress and dramatic failures exhibited over the past few years.

The talk is accessible to general CS audience.

Moshe Y. Vardi, Bio:

Moshe Y. Vardi is the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University. He is the recipient of three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Blaise Pascal Medal, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award, the Southeastern Universities Research Association’s Distinguished Scientist Award, and the Church Award. He is the author and co-author of over 500 papers, as well as two books: “Reasoning about Knowledge” and “Finite Model Theory and Its Applications”. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the European Academy of Science, and Academia Europaea. He holds honorary doctorates from the Saarland University in Germany, Orleans University in France, UFRGS in Brazil, and the University of Liege in Belgium. He is currently a Senior Editor of the Communications of the ACM, after having served for a decade as Editor-in-Chief.