Congratulations to Sumanth Prabhu, Grigory Fedyukovich, Kumar Madhukar, and Deepak D’Souza for their work, titled “Specification Synthesis with Constrained Horn Clauses”, which has received a Distinguished Paper Award at PLDI’21.

Link to join the event: http://bit.do/vvssarma

(Event starts at 7 pm, Online Networking at 6:30 pm)

Abstract:

Complex systems in different domains contain significant amount of software. Several  studies have established that a significant fraction of system outages are due to software faults. Traditional methods of fault avoidance, fault removal based on extensive testing/debugging, and fault tolerance based on design/data diversity are found inadequate to ensure high software dependability.The key challenge then is how to provide highly dependable software. We discuss a viewpoint of fault tolerance of software-based systems to ensure high dependability. We classify software faults into Bohr bugs and Mandel bugs, and identify aging-related bugs as a subtype of the latter. Traditional methods have been designed to deal with Bohr bugs.The next challenge then is to develop mitigation methods for Mandel bugs in general and aging-related  bugs in particular. We submit that mitigation methods for Mandel bugs utilize environmental diversity. Retry operation, restart application, failover to an identical replica (hot, warm or cold) and reboot the OS are examples of mitigation techniques that rely on environmental diversity.  For software aging related bugs it is also possible to utilize proactive environmental diversity technique known as software rejuvenation. We discuss environmental diversity both from experimental and analytic points of view and cite examples of real systems employing these techniques.

Bio of the Speaker:

Kishor S.  Trivedi holds the Hudson Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, Durham, NC. He has a B.Tech (EE,1968) from IIT Mumbai, M.S. (CS,1972) and PhD (CS,1974) from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has been on the Duke faculty since 1975. He is the author of a well- known text entitled, Probability and Statistics with Reliability, Queuing and Computer Science Applications, first published by Prentice-Hall; a thoroughly revised second edition (including its Indian edition) of this book has been published by John Wiley. He has authored several other books. He is a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is a Golden Core Member of IEEE Computer Society. He has published over 600 articles and has supervised 48 Ph.D. dissertations. His h-index is 107. He is a recipient of IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for his research on Software Aging and Rejuvenation. He is a recipient of IEEE Reliability Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He has worked closely with industry in carrying out reliability/availability analysis, providing short courses on reliability, availability, performability modelling and in the development and dissemination of software packages such as SHARPE and SPNP.

About Prof. V.V.S. Sarma (May 1944 – January 2018)

Professor Vallury Subrahmanya Sarma, an extraordinary teacher and researcher, passed away on 13th January 2018 in Bangalore. Professor V.V.S. Sarma was born on May 7, 1944 in Vijayawada. After graduation with a University gold medal in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry  from Andhra University in 1961, he obtained his BE, ME, and PhD degrees from IISc, Bangalore. He served the IISc as faculty in various capacities from 1967. He became a full professor in 1983, and continued his service until his retirement in 2006. He was a visiting Professor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, USA, between1984-86 and at Tata Research Development and Design Centre, Pune between 1995-97. He was elected to the fellowships of Indian Academy of Science, Indian National Science Academy and Indian National Academy of Engineering. Post retirement, he was an Honorary Professor in CSA and an INAE Distinguished Professor.

Professor V.V.S. Sarma fondly called VVS by his students and friends initiated research at IISc in the then emerging areas of reliability engineering, pattern recognition, artificial Intelligence and machine learning, which are areas of utmost importance in the industry today. His survey paper in a special issue on AI in management with some new material in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering entitled “Knowledge-based approaches for scheduling problems: A survey” was widely cited. He has guided a generation of researchers in these areas. His students were drawn from CSA, ECE, Aerospace, Mathematics, and Metallurgy departments and engineers from organizations such as IAF, NAL, ISRO, DRDO, BHEL under the external registration program. Many of his students are currently senior professors in universities or senior engineering researchers in Defense and ISRO across India, USA and Canada. With his collaborators N.Viswanadham and M.G. Singh, he wrote a book “Reliability of Computer and Control Systems” published by North-Holland Systems and Control series in 1987. He co-edited the book “Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems in Indian Context,” published by TataMcGraw-Hill, 1990 jointly with N.Viswanadham, B.L.Deekshatulu, and B. Yegnanarayana. Prof. VVS Sarma was a very inspiring teacher. He used to enthuse and motivate his students to learn many topics of current research. As early as 1976, when the field was still in its infancy, he taught a course on Artificial Intelligence at IISc. He was a very gentle person and used to be affectionate towards all his students. In the passing away of Prof. VVS Sarma the research community has lost a mentor, an influential researcher and an outstanding teacher. All his students lost a father figure whom they will continue to look up to.

All are Welcome!

Shikhar Vashishth, recent PhD graduate from CSA, has been awarded this year’s ACM India Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Prof. Uday Reddy B. receives an Honorable mention in ACM India’s Early Career Research Award 2020 for his fundamental contributions in advancing the theory and practice of polyhedral compilation frameworks.

Vishakha Patil has received the Google PhD Fellowship 2020. She is one of the fifty-three recipients world-wide..

Divya Ravi has won second prize in the 10th IDRBT Doctoral Colloquium, for the work titled ‘On the Round Complexity Landscape of Secure Multiparty Computation’.

The paper titled “Learning-based Controlled Concurrency Testing” by Suvam Mukherjee, Pantazis Deligiannis, Arpita Biswas and Akash Lal, has won the Distinguished Artifact Award at OOPSLA 2020.

Congratulations to Siddharth Barman for being promoted to Associate professor. This is a fast-track promotion.

Many congratulations to our alumna Dr. Suparna Bhattacharya, for being elected as a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE). Dr. Bhattacharya was advised by Prof. K. Gopinath.

Prof. Chiranjib Bhattacharyya takes charge as the Chair of CSA Department.

Arkaprava Basu receives the Pratiksha Trust Young Investigator Award, 2020.

The paper “Best-Fit Bin Packing with Random Order Revisited”, by Arindam Khan, coauthored by Susanne Albers and Leon Ladewig, is one of the 2 submissions receiving the Best Paper Award at the 45th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science(MFCS) 2020.

Bhavana Kanukurthi is promoted to Associate Professor by IISc.

Arpita Patra selected for Google India AI/ML Research Awards 2020.

She is one amongst five faculty members within India selected for this award.

Ajith Suresh has been selected to participate in 8th Heidelberg Laureate Forum which will be conducted during September 19-24, 2021. This year, only a total of 224 researchers were selected to attend the event.

Nidhi Rathi has received the distinguished IBM PhD Fellowship Award for 2020

https://www.research.ibm.com/university/awards/fellowships-awardees.html

Shalabh Bhatnagar has been awarded Prof. Rustom Choksi Award for Excellence in Research for Engineering by IISc.