Tracking Data-Flow with Open Closure Types

Type systems hide data that is captured by function closures in function types. In most cases this is a beneficial design that favors simplicity and compositionality. However, some applications require explicit information about the data that is captured in closures. This paper introduces open closure types, that is, function types that are decorated with type contexts. They are used to track data-flow from the environment into the function closure. A simply-typed lambda calculus is used to study the properties of the type theory of open closure types. A distinctive feature of this type theory is that an open closure type of a function can vary in different type contexts. To present an application of the type theory, it is shown that a type derivation establishes a simple non-interference property in the sense of information-flow theory. A publicly available prototype implementation of the system can be used to experiment with type derivations for example programs.Comment: Logic for Programming Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (2013

Amortised Memory Analysis Using the Depth of Data Structures

Abstract. Hofmann and Jost have presented a heap space analysis [1] that finds linear space bounds for many functional programs. It uses an amortised analysis: assigning hypothetical amounts of free space (called potential) to data structures in proportion to their sizes using type annotations. Constraints on these annotations in the type system ensure that the total potential assigned to the input is an upper bound on the total memory required to satisfy all allocations. We describe a related system for bounding the stack space requirements which uses the depth of data structures, by expressing potential in terms of maxima as well as sums. This is achieved by adding extra structure to typing contexts (inspired by O’Hearn’s bunched typing [2]) to describe the form of the bounds. We will also present the extra steps that must be taken to construct a typing during the analysis. Obtaining bounds on the resource requirements of programs can be crucial for ensuring that they enjoy reliability and security properties, particularly for use i

Metallicity determination in gas-rich galaxies with semiempirical methods

A study of the precision of the semiempirical methods used in the determination of the chemical abundances in gas-rich galaxies is carried out. In order to do this the oxygen abundances of a total of 438 galaxies were determined using the electronic temperature, the $R_{23}$ and the P methods. The new calibration of the P method gives the smaller dispersion for the low and high metallicity regions, while the best numbers in the turnaround region are given by the $R_{23}$ method. We also found that the dispersion correlates with the metallicity. Finally, it can be said that all the semiempirical methods studied here are quite insensitive to metallicity with a value of $8.0\pm0.2$ dex for more than 50% of the total sample. \keywords{ISM: abundances; (ISM): H {\sc ii} regions}Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures and 2 tables. To appear at AJ, January 200

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Deriving efficient parallel programs for complex recurrences

International Symposium on Parallel Symbolic Computation, Proceedings, PASCO101-11027

Translation and optimization for a core calculus with exceptions

10.1145/1480945.1480952Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation, PEPM'0941-5

Automated Verification of Shape, Size and Bag Properties

In recent years, separation logic has emerged as a contender for formal reasoning of heap-manipulating imperative programs. Recent works have focused on specialised provers that are mostly based on fixed sets of predicates. To improve expressivity, we have proposed a prover that can automatically handle user-defined predicates. These shape predicates allow programmers to describe a wide range of data structures with their associated size properties. In the current work, we shall enhance this prover by providing support for a new type of constraints, namely bag (multi-set) constraints. With this extension, we can capture the reachable nodes (or values) inside a heap predicate as a bag constraint. Consequently, we are able to prove properties about the actual values stored inside a data structure

Multiple Pre/Post Specifications for Heap-Manipulating Methods

Automated verification plays an important role for high assurance software. This typically uses a pair of pre/post conditions as a formal (but possibly partial) specification of each method before it is systematically verified. In this paper, we advocate for multiple pairs of pre/post conditions to be associated with each method which provides a way for such specification to be used in more scenarios. Multiple pre/post specifications are important for heap-manipulating programs where they can be precisely expressed using separation logic. This work highlights the importance of multiple pre/post specifications, and a methodology to capture them via set of states during proof search

From statecharts to verilog : a formal approach to hardware/software co-specification

Hardware-Software co-specification is a critical phase in co-design. Our co-specification process starts with a high level graphical description in Statecharts and ends with an equivalent parallel composition of hardware and software descriptions in Verilog. In this paper, we first investigate the Statecharts formalism by providing it a formal syntax and a compositional operational semantics. Based on that, a semantics-preserving linking function is designed to compile specifications written in Statecharts into Verilog. The obtained Verilog specifications are then passed to a partitioning process to generate hardware and software sub-specifications, where the correctness is guaranteed by algebraic laws of Verilog

Automatic debugging of real-time systems based on incremental satisfiability counting

10.1109/TC.2006.97IEEE Transactions on Computers557830-842ITCO