Seminars
View all Seminars | Download ICal for this eventThe Story of Blind Men and the Elephant: Understanding Context Sensitivity
Series: Department Seminar
Speaker: Prof. Uday Khedker
Date/Time: Jan 14 11:30:00
Location: CSA Seminar Hall (Room No. 254, First Floor)
Faculty Advisor:
Abstract:
Context-sensitive methods of program analysis increase the precision of
interprocedural analysis by achieving the effect of call inlining. These
methods have been defined using different formalisms and hence appear as
algorithms that are very different from each other. Some methods define
context, whereas some do not. These methods place different kinds of
restrictions on the data flow frameworks supported by them and seem to
compute different kinds of values. As a consequence, it is difficult
to compare the ideas behind these methods in spite of the fact
that they solve essentially the same problem. We believe that these
incomparable views are similar to blind men views of an elephant called
context-sensitivity.
We bring out this whole-elephant-view of context sensitivity in program
analysis by proposing a unified model of context sensitivity which
provides a clean separation between computation of contexts and
computation of data flow values. Our model facilitates declarative
specifications of context-sensitive methods by capturing the essence of
context-sensitivity. We model most of the known context-sensitive
methods using our unified model. This modelling uncovers the hidden
notion of contexts in some methods, facilitates insightful comparisons
between different methods, and facilitates cross fertilization of ideas
and suggest interesting improvements in the known methods. Further,
our unification also extends every modelled method to bidirectional
analyses.
This is a joint work with Swati Jaiswal.
Speaker Bio:
Uday P. Khedker (http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~uday) finished B.E. from GEC Jabalpur in
1986, M.Tech. from Pune University in 1989, and Ph.D. from IIT Bombay in 1995. He
taught at the Department of Computer Science at Pune University from 1994 to 2001 and
since then is with IIT Bombay where he is currently a Professor of Computer Science &
Engg. His areas of interest are Programming Languages, Compilers and Program Analysis. He
specialises in data flow analysis and its applications to code optimization. He has
published papers in leading journals and conferences, has contributed chapters
in a Compiler Design Handbook, and has authored a book titled “Data Flow Analysis: Theory
and Practice†(http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~uday/dfaBook-web) published by Taylor and
Francis (CRC Press).
Host Faculty: K V Raghavan