[Colloquium] Thursday: Cao/Dissertation Defense/7-5-07

[Margaret Jaffey]

This is a reminder that George Cao's dissertation defense will be  
held on Thursday afternoon.

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		Department of Computer Science/The University of Chicago

					*** Dissertation Defense ***

Candidate:  Jing (George) Cao

Date:  Thursday, July 5, 2007

Time and Location:  2:00 p.m. in Ryerson 276

Title:  Introspection in Dynamically Linked Applications

Abstract:
Introspection allows a program to access and modify its own meta-level
information. Some programming language systems, for instance, Java and
Lisp,  provide features supporting various forms of introspection. We  
can
characterize these features as structural introspection or  behavioral
introspection. Structural introspection provides access to information
about the static structure of a program, while behavioral introspection
provides access to information about run-time behavior of a program.
Unfortunately, dynamically linked applications written in C/C++ lack  
high
level introspective features.

In this thesis, we present a novel approach to bringing introspection to
dynamically linked applications. We modify the linux dynamic linker by
adding a programmable interface to provide introspective services to  
user
programs. Applications running with the new linker have the ability to
control their own module searching and assembling, symbol resolution,  
name
binding and other run-time behaviors. In addition, programs can use the
new linker to collect structural information such as module dependencies
and internal structure of object files.

To show how to exploit the capabilities of our linker, we include two  
case
studies. The first case study is to re-implement the Wrapped Application
Debugger (WAD). Using the new introspective mechanisms, we can greatly
simplify WAD's development. as our second case study, we implement a
contract checker system: SimpleContract. SimpleContract works by  
inserting
contracts at the execution points defined by the underlying dynamic
linker. Currently SimpleContract supports pre-condition/post-condition
behavior contracts and two simple sequential contracts: before and  
after.

Candidate's Advisor:  Prof. Dave MacQueen

A draft copy of George Cao's dissertation is available in Ry 161A.

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Margaret P. Jaffey                             margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 161A)        (773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago                  http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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