After only a little more than one and a half years, we were now able to publish the (extended) journal version of our RV07 paper on Collaborative Runtime Verification with Tracematches. What’s it about? The idea is simple: Assume you are doing runtime verification, but the nature of the property you want to monitor requires you to instrument some really hot loops in your code. In result, your instrumented program runs very slow. So why not split up the instrumentation load? Multiple users get different “probes” of instrumentation. Instrumentation can even be enabled only temporarily in order to reduce the 
overall runtime overhead. In this paper we showed that this approach works and most importantly scales (see graphic to the right). Plus, we avoid any false positive (false warnings), due to a special pointer analysis of the verification property, even if the instrumentation is partially disabled and therefore certain events may be missed. The journal paper is very similar to the workshop paper but it’s self-contained. free download here
Collaborative Runtime Verification with Tracematches
Eric | November 29, 2008Packs and phases in Soot
Eric | November 26, 2008This the fourth post in a series of blog posts about frequently asked questions with using Soot. Today’s topic will be on packs and phases in Soot.
One frequent question that comes up on the Soot mailing list is when to run a particular analysis in Soot. Soot’s execution is divided in a set of different packs and each pack contains different phases. Therefore the question could be rephrased as “In which pack do I have to run my analysis or transformation?”. This tutorial tries to help you answer this question.
Protected: Von Atlanta, Hydranten mit Schildchen, und Mooseriegeln
Eric | November 23, 2008Congratulations
Eric | November 22, 2008
I am happy to announce the winners of the annual Peephole Optimization Contest in COMP 520 (Compiler Design): Ning Jia, Alexis Malozemoff and Wei Wu. Congratulations!
As you can see in the results (PPTX), these students even managed to outperform javac in terms of the size of the generated code!
P.S. The above image is courtesy of Harlan Erskine, showing a piece of art of Jen Stark (and has nothing to do with the contest 😉 , in case you are wondering ).
FSE slides
Eric | November 13, 2008
Some people asked me about the slides of my FSE presentation. You can download the slides here. Note that you may need the PowerPoint 2007 player. Feedback is welcome! 😉
Off to “Peachtree City”
Eric | November 10, 2008
During the next fee days I will be enjoying FSE in Atlanta, where for some weird reason everything is called Peachtree <whatever>. I guess that must be an American thing. In Canada they don’t do that: if you search for a “Maple Road” in Montreal, where do you land? Wisconsin! Point proven 🙂
At FSE, I’ll be presenting our latest breed on static verification using tracematches. Who knows – maybe I’ll see you there?
RWTH Alumni Jahrestreffen in Montreal
Eric | November 7, 2008
I am proud to announce that the next “Jahrestreffen” of the Association of Alumni, Friends, and Supporters of the RWTH Aachen University in North America will take place in Montreal. The tentative dates of the meeting are Thursday, May 14th until Sunday May 17th, 2009. So whether you live in the U.S., in Mexico or in Canada already, come and join us for some truly Canadian experience! I will post a tentative program within the next couple of months.
Hire an Eric
Eric | November 4, 2008
Yes, I guess it’s time to put my suit on… As I am planning to graduate (with Ph.D.) in summer 2009, I am currently looking out for interesting jobs, both in academia and industry. So if you have an interesting opening in some German or English speaking part of Europe, please let me know. All my application material (Resume, CV, Research and Teaching Statement) are available on my hiring website. To find out more about my research have a look here or browse my research block.
