Speaker: Thomas W. Reps

Time: 9:00-11:00 a.m., April 28, 2023, GMT+8

Venue: Room 1131, Science Building #1 (Yanyuan) & Room 440-441, Computer Science Building (Changping) (Online: https://live.bilibili.com/10165043)

Abstract:

What could symbolic model checking, path profiling, and quantum simulation possibly have in common?

CFLOBDDs are a data structure that is essentially plug-compatible with Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs), and hence useful for representing certain classes of functions, relations, matrices, graphs, etc. in a highly compressed fashion. CFLOBDDs share many of the good properties of BDDs, but -- in the best case -- the CFLOBDD for a function can be exponentially smaller than any BDD for that function. Compared with the size of the decision tree for a function, a CFLOBDD -- again, in the best case -- can give a double-exponential reduction in size.

CFLOBDDs have the potential to permit applications to (i) execute much faster, and (ii) handle much larger problem instances than has been possible heretofore. However, CFLOBDDs have certain additional overheads compared with BDDs, so they are only better than BDDs for representing very large relations. The successful application area we found is quantum simulation, where the matrices that need to be represented are huge.

Where does path profiling fit into the story? Come to this talk to find out!

Joint work with Meghana Aparna Sistla (UT-Austin) and Swarat Chaudhuri (UT-Austin).

Biography:

Thomas W. Reps is the J. Barkley Rosser Professor & Rajiv and Ritu Batra Chair in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin, which he   joined in 1985.  Reps is the author or co-author of four books and more than two hundred thirty papers describing his research. His work has concerned a wide variety of topics, including program slicing, dataflow analysis, pointer analysis, model checking, computer security, code instrumentation, language-based program-development environments, the use of program profiling in software testing, software renovation, incremental algorithms, and attribute grammars.

Professor Reps received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1982.   His Ph.D. dissertation won the 1983 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Reps has also been the recipient of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1986), a Packard Fellowship (1988), a Humboldt Research Award (2000), and a   Guggenheim Fellowship (2000). He is also an ACM Fellow (2005). In 2013, Reps   was elected a foreign member of Academia Europaea. Reps received the ACM   SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award for 2017.

Reps has held visiting positions at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) in Rocquencourt, France (1982-83), the University of Copenhagen, Denmark (1993-94), the Consiglio Nazionale delle   Ricerche in Pisa, Italy (2000-2001), and the University Paris Diderot-Paris 7 (2007-2008).

Source: School of Computer Science