Master’s Theses on Programming Validation Tools at Michael Schwartzbach

MTP2 Who are we? Michael Schwartzbach (lektor) Anders Møller (adjunkt) Claus Brabrand (post doc.) Aske Simon Christensen (ph.d.) Christian Kirkegaard (ph.d.) Currently 4-8 Master’s students

MTP3 What’s the Problem? Rice’s Theorem: Every interesting question about programs in a Turing complete language is undecidable. Workarounds: –Ask uninteresting questions (rejected :-) –Settle for approximate answers (we like this) –Don’t use Turing complete languages (sometimes)

MTP4 What do we do? High-level domain-specific language design Program analysis and verification Implementation of efficient tools General purpose languages (mostly Java) WWW/XML software development

MTP5 Some Recent Projects JWIG (static validation of Web services) XACT (static validation of XML transformations) DSD (expressive schema language for XML) JSA (analysis of string expressions in Java) METAFRONT (safe syntax transformations) PALE (deciding assertions about pointers) MONA (world’s fastest implementation of M2L)

MTP6 Some Recent Thesis Topics Control-flow analysis of Servlets and JSP (2005) A domain-specific language for Web surfing (2005) Understanding shape analysis (2005) Static validation of XSLT (2004) Survey of automatic error checking techniques (2004) Specification and validation of Web services (2004) Contracts for Web service development (2004) Extensible syntax transformation (2003) Static bounds on memory usage in Java (2002) Automatic validation of Web forms (2002)

MTP7 Typical Template for Thesis Work –Identify practical problem –Come up with a really good idea (or get one from us :-) –Survey literature –Develop necessary theory –Implement a tool –Run experiments

MTP8 Some Statistics Out of 32 Master’s students, all have: –Written a report of 100 pages –Written at least 10,000 lines of code Groups are encouraged: –Average group size is 1.4 Many theses solve real problems: –Publication rate is 40%

MTP9 Recent Courses dWebTek (2004, 2005) dRegAut (2004, 2005) Concurrency (T-IT) (2004, 2005) dOvs (2005) Interactive Web Services (2002) Software Validation (2003) Static Analysis (2003, 2004, 2005) Advanced XML (2004)