Research

Here is some information on my current and past research projects and my publications. Also see my DBLP page.

current

Thin Slicing

I'm working on thin slicing, an alternative to program slicing that aims to better focus on statements most relevant to debugging and program understanding tasks.

• Thin Slicing with Stephen J. Fink and Rastislav Bodik. In Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN 2007 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2007). San Diego, CA, June 11-13, 2007. Talk slides

Points-To Analysis

I'm working on developing fast and precise points-to analysis algorithms, with potential applications in development environments, just-in-time compilers, and verification tools.

• Refinement-Based Context-Sensitive Points-To Analysis for Java with Rastislav Bodik. Published in Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN 2006 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2006). Ottawa, Canada, June 10-16, 2006. Technical report with full data. Talk slides
• Demand-Driven Points-To Analysis for Java with Denis Gopan, Lexin Shan, and Rastislav Bodik. Published in Proceedings of Twentieth Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2005). San Diego, CA, October 16-20, 2005. Talk slides

past

Program Analysis Group at Microsoft Research

Under Dr. Zhe Yang, I worked on developing a postmortem analysis that produces execution traces from bug reports, helping programmers to reason about such reports more easily.

• PSE: Explaining Program Failures via Postmortem Static Analysis with Roman Manevich, Stephen Adams, Manuvir Das, and Zhe Yang. Published in Proceedings of Twelfth ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2004). Newport Beach, CA, November 2-4, 2004. Talk slides

Software Design Group at MIT Lab for Computer Science

Under Prof. Daniel Jackson, I worked on the design and implementation of the Alloy lightweight modelling language.

• Debugging Overconstrainted Declarative Models Using Unsatisfiable Cores with Ilya Shlyakhter, Robert Seater, Daniel Jackson, and Mana Taghdiri. Published in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2003). Montreal, Canada, October 6-10, 2003. Winner, best paper award.
• Analyzing Distributed Algorithms with First-Order Logic with Ilya Shlyakhter and Daniel Jackson. Unpublished manuscript.
• A Micromodularity Mechanism with Daniel Jackson and Ilya Shlyakhter. Published in Proceedings of Foundations of Software Engineering / European Software Engineering Conference (FSE/ESEC 2001). Vienna, Austria, September 10-14, 2001.

DejaVu Project at IBM Research

Under Dr. Jong-Deok Choi, I worked on extensions and new applications for DejaVu, a tool which allows for deterministic replay of non-deterministic multithreaded Java programs.

• Dynamic Datarace Detection for Object-Oriented Programs. M.Eng. thesis, May 2002.
• Efficient and Precise Datarace Detection for Multithreaded Object-Oriented Programs with Jong-Deok Choi, Keunwoo Lee, Alexey Loginov, Robert O'Callahan, and Vivek Sarkar. Published in Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2002). Berlin, Germany, June 17-19, 2002.
• A Debugging Platform for Java Server Applications with Bowen Alpern, Jong-Deok Choi, Ton Ngo, John Vlissides, and Hytm-Gyoo Yook. IBM Research Report 22036.
• A Perturbation-Free Replay Platform for Cross-Optimized Multithreaded Applications with Jong-Deok Choi, Bowen Alpern, Ton Ngo, and John Vlissides. Published in Proceedings of Fifteenth International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2001). San Francisco, CA, April 23-27, 2001.

Information Economies Project at IBM Research

Working under Dr. Gerald Tesauro, I researched the use of regression trees as a function approximator for a reinforcement learning algorithm utilized by economic software agents.

• Multi-agent Q-Learning and Regression Trees for Automated Pricing Decisions with Gerald J. Tesauro. Published in Proceedings of Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2000). Stanford University, CA, June 29-July 2, 2000. Also published in Game Theory and Decision Theory in Agent-Based Systems.

PML at UC Berkeley

With Evan Chang, I worked on developing the Pathway Modeling Language, a high-level language for modeling biological systems.

• PML: Toward a High-Level Formal Language for Biological Systems with Evan Chang. Published in Proceedings of Workshop on Concurrent Models in Molecular Biology (BioConcur 2003). Marseille, France, September 6, 2003.

Combinatorial Game Theory at UC Berkeley

AJ Shankar and I used computational search to find interesting new positions in the game of Domineering.

• New Temperatures in Domineering with AJ Shankar. Published in INTEGERS Journal, Volume 5, 2005.