[CS] Utsav Sethi Dissertation Defense/Oct 22

[via cs]

This is an announcement of Utsav Sethi's Dissertation Defense.
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Candidate: Utsav Sethi

Date: Tuesday, October 22,2024

Time:  11am-1pm CT

Location: JCL 280

Remote Location: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/96894216857?pwd=P5GZm92o8OWuXTSQaLlmsVn7aXqvJo.1

Title: Improving Task-Resilience Mechanisms in Software Systems

Abstract: Modern software necessarily implements mechanisms designed to anticipate and handle transient task-level errors. Such mechanisms include retry, cancellation, checkpointing and timeout, and are critical to the smooth operation of almost every type of software application - especially the distributed and large scale applications in use everywhere today.

This dissertation aims to analyze and detect problems in two widely-used mechanisms: cancellation and retry. Guided by an analysis of real-world problems, this work develops approaches to detect common issues using static program analysis. The first part investigates techniques to detect cancel issuance and fulfillment problems using traditional static analysis. The second part investigates techniques for detecting non-standard retry implementations and associated problems using traditional as well as LLM-enabled analysis. These techniques find hundreds of problems in popular open-source distributed app

Advisors: Shan Lu
Committee: Shan Lu, Haryadi Gunawi, Madan Musuvathi