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UNM CS Paper Wins International Award

July 25, 2012

Weimer icse2012 invariants7-25-12 –  A team led by UNM Computer Science recently received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the premier academic software engineering conference, the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), in Zurich, Switzerland.

(image from “Using Dynamic Analysis to Discover Polynomial and Array Invariants” Automatic Generation of Dynamic Invariants. The generator finds different types of invariants from program traces. The post-processing step removes redundant and spurious invariants.)

The team includes UNM PhD student ThanhVu Nguyen, Stephanie Forrest, Professor of Computer Science at UNM, Deepak Kapur, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UNM, and Westley Weimer, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia.

Their paper is titled “Using Dynamic Analysis to Discover Polynomial and Array Invariants.” It concerns dynamic invariant analysis, which identifies important program properties that can aid programmers in refactoring, documenting, and debugging tasks by making dynamic (run-time) patterns visible statically. Current dynamic analysis methods support such invariants in only very limited forms. The authors combine mathematical techniques, such as equation solving, polyhedra construction, and automated theorem proving, to bring new capabilities to dynamic invariant detection.

Catalin Roman, dean of the UNM School of Engineering, who served as general chair for ICSE in 2005, says, “My long history of involvement with ICSE makes it exceedingly personal to see that a contribution from our school is being honored in the most competitive venue in the area of software engineering.”