pdc2008

Research: Concurrency Analysis Platform and Tools for Finding Concurrency Bugs

System — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:39:25 GMT

Learn about the Concurrency Analysis Platform (CAP) from Microsoft Research and how it enables various concurrency bug-finding tools. See a demo of CHESS, a tool built on CAP for finding and reproducing Heisenbugs. Also hear about future tools from Microsoft Research, including a lightweight data-race detection engine and a tool for finding memory-model errors.

Thomas Ball
Thomas Ball is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research where he manages the Software Reliability Research group (http://research.microsoft.com/srr/). Tom has been at Microsoft Research since 1999. He is one of the originators of the SLAM project, a software model checking engine for C that forms the basis of the Static Driver Verifier tool, made freely available by Microsoft for finding defects in device drivers. Tom's interests range from program analysis, model checking, testing and automated theorem proving to the problems of defining and measuring software quality.
Madan Musuvathi
Madan Musuvathi is a Researcher at Microsoft Research and is interested in building program analysis tools to improve the productivity of developers and testers. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2004.

Research: Contract Checking and Automated Test Generation with Pex

System — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:39:13 GMT

In theory, Design by Contract and unit testing are excellent approaches to improve code quality. Learn how to use code contracts that express pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants in any managed language that improve testability, enhance static analysis, and serve as checked API documentation. Contracts are leveraged for advanced static analysis and translated into runtime checks. See how automated program exploration (Pex) discovers boundary conditions in code that cause failures and generates traditional unit test suites with high code coverage. Contracts and Pex work together to target contract checks, runtime failures (null dereferences, index out of range, etc.), and any other kind of assertions. Use them to write higher quality software with less effort.

Nikolai Tillmann
Nikolai Tillmann has been with Microsoft Research for 6 years. He is currently leading the Pex project, building an automated test case generation tool for .NET based program analysis. Previously, he worked on Spec Explorer, a model-based testing tool.
Mike Barnett
Mike Barnett has been at Microsoft Research since 1995. He has spent the last several years working on the Spec# project, an advanced verification environment and language for .NET.

Research: Designing the World Wide Telescope

System — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:36:08 GMT

Hear from the architect of the World Wide Telescope discuss the challenges and opportunities in creating World Wide Telescope as a massively scalable software plus services application. Understand the scale of the data, the communities and capabilities of user generated content, and the rich client application and the service behind it.

Jonathan Fay
Jonathan is a 15 year Microsoft veteran who focuses on studying the intersection of graphics/imaging and networks. He is currently the architect of Microsoft WorldWide Telescope. Jonathan is also an avid amateur astronomer and designed built his own automated domed observatory as well as helped develop the field of DSLR astrophotography. When he is not at work on WorldWide Telescope Jonathan tries keep up with his 5 children and explain to them the majesty of the stars.

Research: BAM, AjaxScope, and Doloto

System — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:39:11 GMT

See Microsoft Research present new technologies for developing, debugging, and deploying web applications. Hear how BAM can turn a simple specification into a web-based cloud application with the click of a button. Learn how AjaxScope and Doloto automatically instrument and rewrite your web applications' JavaScript code for end-to-end monitoring and optimization.

Ethan Jackson
Emre Kiciman
Emre Kiciman is a researcher in the Internet Services Research Center (ISRC) at Microsoft Research, where his interests are broadly in the area of large-scale Internet services, their operations, and their end-to-end reliability. His work focuses on monitoring and machine learning analysis of system behavior to improve reliability and performance. Most recently, he's been working on Web application performance and debugging.