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Prof. Stephen Freund on "Stopping the Software Bug Epidemic"

1,540 views · Published 29 March 2011 · 50:02 · Indexed 19 October 2026

Channel: Williams College · 2011 · Education

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In the third lecture of the annual Faculty Lecture Series on Thursday, Feb. 24, Stephen Freund, associate professor of computer science, will present "Stopping the Software Bug Epidemic" at 4 p.m. in Wege Auditorium on the Williams College campus. A reception will follow the talk, which is free and open to the public. 

Software bugs, mistakes made by engineers in a program's source code, plague every computer system.  Sometimes the effects are trivial, but sometimes they are catastrophic. Given the increasingly pervasive role of computers in society, creating more reliable software systems is an important task. 

In his talk, Freund will examine how software is written and why it is so difficult to get right. He will then discuss how research on automatic program checkers may enable programmers to more quickly find and fix bugs. Freund will then describe a particular checker designed to catch concurrency bugs.  

Among Freund's research interests are the design and implementation of programming languages, race condition and atomicity checking, type-based program analysis, and verification of multithreaded programs. His work has been published in journals including Communications of the ACM, Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, and Theoretical Computer Science. 

Freund joined the Williams faculty in 2002, after working as a member of the research staff at Compaq Systems Research Center for two years. Freund teaches courses including Principles of Programming Languages, Data Structures and Advanced Programming, Introduction to Computer Science, and an advanced tutorial on Compiler Design.

Freund earned his B.S. in computer science from Stanford in 1995 and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2000.  

The next speaker in the Faculty Lecture Series will be Claire Ting, associate professor of biology, who will present a lecture titled "Minimal Genomes, Maximal Productivity: Microbial Strategies for Dominating the High Seas."

Produced by Bill Matthiesen '70, Berkshire Film & Video, www.bfv.com

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