The SaS Seminars are a permanent series of open seminars of the Division of Software and Systems (SaS) at the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA), Linköping University. The objective of the seminars is to present outstanding research and ideas/problems relevant for SaS present and future activities. In particular, seminars cover the SaS research areas software engineering, programming environments, system software, embedded SW/HW systems, computer systems engineering, realtime systems, parallel and distributed computing, and theoretical computer science. - Two kinds of seminars are planned:

• talks by invited speakers not affiliated with SaS,

• internal seminars presenting lab research to whole SaS.

The speakers are expected to give a broad perspective of the presented research, adressing the audience with a general computer science background but possibly with no specific knowledge in the domain of the presented research. The normal length of a presentation is 60 minutes, including discussion.

The SaS seminars are coordinated by Christoph Kessler.

• Participant list (PDF)
• SaS seminar course plan (information for PhD students)

Upcoming SaS Seminars (Autumn 2012)

Security testing of fast time-to-market code

Dr. Mariano Ceccato, FBK Trento, Italy

Thursday 22/11 13:15 room Alan Turing

Abstract:

Given the fast time-to-market model of web applications, often a short time is devoted to the assessment of code quality. While crashes and faults are detrimental for the user experiences, subtle bugs that involve security features are dangerous for the security and the confidentiality of data. Our research objective is to develop novel approaches for automating the security testing of web applications, to guarantee high security while preserving a fast development model.
The problem of identifying those input values that expose these vulnerabilities can be formulated as a search problem. Search results represent test cases to be used by software developers to understand and fix security problems. A security oracle is required to evaluate if a security defect has been solved by a valid fix. The oracle is a classifier able to decide if the application passes security tests. Diverse approaches will be presented for the generation of appropriate inputs, i.e. the security test cases, and for the implementation of the security oracle.

Mariano Ceccato is tenured researcher in FBK (Fondazione Bruno Kessler) in Trento, Italy. He received the master degree in Software Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2003 and the PhD in Computer Science from the University of Trento in 2006 under the supervision of Paolo Tonella, with the thesis Migrating Object Oriented code to Aspect Oriented Programming.
His research interests include security testing, migration of legacy systems and empirical studies. He has been program co-chair of the 12th IEEE Working Conference of Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2012) held in Riva del Garda, Italy.

Discovering Parallelism with an Architecture Independent Abstraction
(and Supporting it Architecturally on CMPs)

Dr. Martti Forsell, VTT Oulu, Finland

Thursday 15 november 2012, 15:15, room Alan Turing

Abstract:

The essence of parallel computing is to divide the functionality at hand into a number of subtasks that can be executed in parallel and somehow to form the solution of the original problem from the subtask results. Efficient architectural realization of this requires streamlined execution of computational threads, cost-efficient synchronization of subtasks and a scalable mechanism for communication latency hiding. As current chip multiprocessor (CMP) architectures are moving to the direction of heterogeneous collections of computing engines optimized more and more for certain application domains, these efficiency requirements are fading farther and farther if the application does not match the architecture. At the same time, parallelism discovery and efficient mapping (and thus parallel programming in general) are becoming increasingly challenging because architectures provide their best performance (and efficiency) for a limited set of computational patterns.
In this presentation we show - against the common belief - that these problems are architectural rather than related to programming models and tools. For current CMP architectures, our solution is to use an architecture independent abstraction letting the programmer to focus on intrinsic parallelism of the computational problem without the burden of taking architectural optimizations into account and then manually refining/transforming/optimizing the solution to the target architectures. We also outline our REPLICA architecture that is able to execute the above architecture dependent abstraction natively and therefore is free of these problems.

Speaker's profile:

Martti Forsell is a Chief Research Scientist of Computer Architecture and Parallel Computing at VTT, Oulu, Finland, as well as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of Oulu. He received M.Sc., Ph.Lic., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Joensuu, Finland in 1991, 1994, and 1997 respectively. Prior to joining VTT, he has acted as a lecturer, researcher, and acting professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Joensuu.
Dr. Forsell has a long background in parallel and sequential computer architecture and parallel computing research. He is the inventor of the first scalable high-performance CMP architecture armed with an easy-to-use general-purpose parallel application development scheme (consisting of a computational model, programming language, experimental optimizing compiler, and simulation tools) exploiting the PRAM-model, as well as a number of other TLP and ILP architectures, architectural techniques, models of computation and development methodologies and tools for general purpose computing.
At the application-specific front, he has acted as the main architect of the Silicon Hive CSP 2500 processor and programming methodology aimed for low-power digital front-end radio signal processing. He has co-organized the Highly Parallel Processing on a Chip (HPPC) workshop series between 2007-2011.
Currently he acts as the leader of a large VTT funded project, REPLICA, aiming to remove the performance and programmability limitations of chip multiprocessor architectures with a help of a strong model of computation.

Some new aspects of software modeling

Dr. Pär Emanuelson, Ericsson AB and IDA/PELAB

Thursday 1 november 2012, 15:15, room Alan Turing

Abstract: Since the middle of the nineties I have been working with several aspects of software modeling. I started out with using models as a high level language to do code generation from. UML seemed to be a good base for doing such languages, but the lack of well-defined semantics and the general use of the language has made this difficult. It was not until 10 years that we got an action language and UML still has lots of "semantic variation points" that has been an obstacle for understanding and model portability. This talk will focus on two aspects of modeling that I have worked with the last 5 years. The first is model based testing which means that, instead of defining dozens or hundreds of test cases, you make only one - very general - test case. You can then use this test case to generate as many test cases as you would like and have time to execute, and you can do this any number of times. I will talk about experiences from two - very different - model based testing tools. One of them is input oriented and the other one is state machine oriented. The second area I will talk about is diff/merge for models. In large industrial projects, with hundreds of developers working simultaneously, it cannot be avoided that developers attempt to change the same model unit at the same time. The changes done by several developers then have to be merged, a problem that has been very underestimated. The lack of good merge tools is considered as one of the greatest threats to industrial use of modeling.

Speaker's profile: Pär Emanuelsson holds a PhD in computer science from Linköping University (1980). Pär has been working in industry the major part of his career, but has in several ways been connected to universities and research. Methods for modeling of software started to appear in the nineties and Pär made one of the first applications in Sweden. He has worked on several aspects of modeling such as model based testing, code generation, modeling language design and merge of models. He has also done research in methods for improving software quality such as static analysis and fault prediction. Since half a year Pär shares his working time between Ericsson as a researcher and IDA as adjungerad Professor.

Previous SaS Seminars

• 2012
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006
• 2005
• 2004
• 2003
• 2002
• 2001

Page responsible: Christoph Kessler
Last updated: 2012-11-25