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 Software needs Watchdogs Speaker (s):
Tom Henzinger
Professor,
Institute of Science and Technology Austria
| Date: Time: Venue: | | 7 May 2025, Wednesday 10:30am – 11:30am School of Computing &
Information Systems 2 (SCIS 2)
Level 4, Seminar Room 4-3
Singapore Management University
90 Stamford Road,
Singapore 178903 Please register by 6 May 2025.  |
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About the Talk We advocate the increased real-time monitoring of software by software. Only third-party monitors increase the trust in the monitored software, and only low-overhead monitors are widely acceptable. These restrictions have technical consequences. Third-party monitors cannot instrument the monitored source code. Low-overhead monitors must be best-effort so not to slow down the monitored software. We build a theoretical framework and corresponding middleware for the online black-box monitoring of quantitative software properties, such as average or maximal response time of a server, or algorithmic fairness in decision making. Unlike static verification, which answers reachability queries for programs, monitoring is runtime verification, which answers membership queries for observed program behaviors with regard to a given formal specification. Our monitors are not necessarily finite-state, and their verdicts may be approximate or probabilistic. This allows for a rich spectrum of cost-precision-confidence trade-offs in monitoring. About the Speaker Tom Henzinger is professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), chair of the Austrian Council for Sciences, Technology, and Innovation (FORWIT), and member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council (ERC). He holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University (1991) and Dr.h.c. degrees from Fourier University in Grenoble, France, and from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He was Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbruecken, Germany, and Professor of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. From 2009 until 2022, he was the founding president of ISTA in Klosterneuburg, Austria. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Europaea, the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. |
