Eric Bodden

20°C

Over the holidays I was able to finalize my dissertation on “Verifying finite-state properties of large-scale programs”.

It’s a great feeling to get this weight of my shoulders. 311 pages were not easy to manage in the end… Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the document, especially to Jan Sinscheck, who still found quite a few typos and misplaced commata in the end. The thesis will shortly be available through eScholarship@McGill and through ProQuest (as PDF and in print).

In my doctoral dissertation (click here for a draft), I present Clara (Compile-time Approximation of Runtime Analyses), a novel research framework for the implementation of hybrid typestate analyses. Clara is now online – fully documented – at: http://www.bodden.de/clara/

Typestate properties aid program understanding, and one can even define type systems that prevent programmers from causing typestate errors, or derive static typestate analyses that try to determine whether a given program violates typestate properties. Unfortunately, the typestate-analysis problem is generally undecidable. Researchers have therefore proposed a hybrid approach that uses
static-analysis results to generate a residual runtime monitor. This monitor captures actual property violations as they occur, but only updates its internal state at relevant statements, as determined through static analysis.

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Today is D-Day – Dissertation Day! What does it take for a dissertation? A box full of three and a half year’s worth of work…

7 copies, that is 2107 pages, printed on 1057 sheets of paper:

The proof: it’s done! (Yes, the bandage around my wrist shows the effort – too much heavy –duty typing lately. But vacation is on the way.)

Update: If you thought the red tape was restricted to my wrist you were wrong. Just one hour after my submission I got notice that allegedly one of my forms was filled out incorrectly. *sigh*

So what’s next? First of all vacation in the Maritimes. I suppose that’s well deserved.