Speaker: Dawson Engler
Stanford University
Monday, March 6, 2006
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
EBU3b 1202

ABSTRACT
For this session of Frontiers in Computer Science Dr. Dawson Engler will change up the format a bit by giving two short talks!

"EXE: A System for Automatically Generating Inputs of Death" will present a practical symbolic execution system, EXE ("EXecution generated Executions") engineered for deep automatic checking of systems code. The central insight behind EXE is that code can be used to automatically generate its own (potentially highly complex) test cases through the use of symbolic execution.

"Experience with Commercializing a Static Bug Finding Tool" will be a brief talk discussing some startling events that happened over the first three years of a company, Coverity, founded to commercialize static bug finding work done at Stanford.

BIO
Dawson Engler is an associate professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from MIT and his B.S. from the University of Arizona. Dr. Engler's research focuses on automated methods for finding errors program source code. He is known for the development of metacompilation -- the application of high-level programmer-written static checkers to find semantic rule violations -- and for techniques to scale the application of formal model checking to large software systems. Less well known, Dr. Engler also finished second in the 1991 Jr. California "drug free-for-life" bodybuilding competition.