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Tracking program footprints

1,157 views · Published 17 October 2012 · 1:09:53 · Indexed 2 October 2026

Channel: Imperial College London · 2012 · Science & Technology

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Professor  Philippa Gardner's inaugural lecture. 10 Oct 2012 Imperial College London

Tracking program footprints: guaranteeing what computers do

We cannot yet guarantee what computers do. Our understanding of programs has not kept pace with their increasing complexity: software licences give no guarantees; simple program errors turn into major attacks; web apps make your browser hang; and concurrent programs are too difficult to write. 
 
Mathematical reasoning techniques could provide guarantees about what programs do. However, such techniques are only just beginning to scale to large programs. In this, her inaugural lecture Professor Philippa Gardner will talk about resource reasoning, whose pivotal concept is the idea of 'footprints'. A footprint identifies the essential memory used by a program, which can be separated from the untouched memory, enabling the reasoning to scale. 
 
Professor Gardner introduces abstract resource reasoning, focusing on abstract footprints such as sets and web pages, rather than the spaghetti-like memory used by the program. Abstraction provides a 'fiction of separation', widening the scope of resource reasoning to web apps and complex concurrent programs.

For more information please visit:

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/engineering/computing/eventssummary/event_8-10-2012-10-10-24

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