The FMCAD 2016 Graduate Student Forum

The FMCAD Student Forum provides a platform for graduate students at any career stage to introduce their research to the wider Formal Methods community, and solicit feedback.In 2016, the event took place in Mountain View, California, as integral part of the FMCAD conference. Ten students were invited to give a short talk and present a poster illustrating their work. The presentations covered a broad range of topics in the field of verification and synthesis, including automated reasoning, model checking of hardware, software, as well as hybrid systems, verification and synthesis of networks, and application of artificial intelligence techniques to circuit design

Efficient Synthesis of Network Updates

Software-defined networking (SDN) is revolutionizing the networking industry, but current SDN programming platforms do not provide automated mechanisms for updating global configurations on the fly. Implementing updates by hand is challenging for SDN programmers because networks are distributed systems with hundreds or thousands of interacting nodes. Even if initial and final configurations are correct, naively updating individual nodes can lead to incorrect transient behaviors, including loops, black holes, and access control violations. This paper presents an approach for automatically synthesizing updates that are guaranteed to preserve specified properties. We formalize network updates as a distributed programming problem and develop a synthesis algorithm based on counterexample-guided search and incremental model checking. We describe a prototype implementation, and present results from experiments on real-world topologies and properties demonstrating that our tool scales to updates involving over one-thousand nodes

Journal Staff

UPMAR

OptiRica: Towards an Efficient Optimizing Horn Solver

This paper describes an ongoing effort to develop an optimizing version of the Eldarica Horn solver. The work starts from the observation that many kinds of optimization problems, and in particular the MaxSAT/SMT problem, can be seen as search problems on lattices. The paper presents a Scala library providing a domain-specific language (DSL) to uniformly model optimization problems of this kind, by defining, manipulating, and systematically exploring lattices with associated objective functions. The framework can be instantiated to obtain an optimizing Horn solver. As an illustration, the application of an optimizing solver for repairing software-defined networks is described.Comment: In Proceedings HCVS/VPT 2022, arXiv:2211.1067

Web Person Name Disambiguation Using Social Links and Enriched Profile Information

In this article, we investigate the problem of cross-document person name disambiguation, which aimed at resolving ambiguities between person names and clustering web documents according to their association to different persons sharing the same name. The majority of previous work often formulated cross-document name disambiguation as a clustering problem. These methods employed various syntactic and semantic features either from the local corpus or distant knowledge bases to compute similarities between entities and group similar entities. However, these approaches show limitations regarding robustness and performance. We propose an unsupervised, graph-based name disambiguation approach to improve the performance and robustness of the state-of-the-art. Our approach exploits both local information extracted from the given corpus, and global information obtained from distant knowledge bases. We show the effectiveness of our approach by testing it on standard WePS datasets. The experimental results are encouraging and show that our proposed method outperforms several baseline methods and also its counterparts. The experiments show that our approach not only improves the performances, but also increases the robustness of name disambiguation

A comparative study of signal processing methods for structural health monitoring

In this paper four non-parametric and five parametric signal processing techniques are reviewed and their performances are compared through application to a sample exponentially damped synthetic signal with closely-spaced frequencies representing the ambient response of structures. The non-parametric methods are Fourier transform, periodogram estimate of power spectral density, wavelet transform, and empirical mode decomposition with Hilbert spectral analysis (Hilbert-Huang transform). The parametric methods are pseudospectrum estimate using the multiple signal categorization (MUSIC), empirical wavelet transform, approximate Prony method, matrix pencil method, and the estimation of signal parameters by rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT) method. The performances of different methods are studied statistically using the Monte Carlo simulation and the results are presented in terms of average errors of multiple sample analyses