EE Seminar: Towards Synthesis in Real Life

~~(The talk will be given in English)

Speaker:       Dr. Dana Fishman
                        Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania

Sunday, January 3rd, 2016
15:00 - 16:00
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering

Towards Synthesis in Real Life

Abstract
System synthesis refers to the task of automatically generating an executable system from a high level specification of its behavior.  The basic idea is simple and appealing: instead of developing a system and then verifying that it adheres to its specification, we would like to have an automated procedure that, given a specification, constructs a system that is correct by construction. The first formulation of synthesis was given by Church back in the sixties, but the path to achieving it is strewn with difficulties. In this talk I will describe some of the challenges on the road to usable synthesis, a variety of current approaches for coping with them, and some success stories.

Short bio:
Dana Fisman is a research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, the Associate Director of the NSF expedition ExCAPE about system synthesis, and a visiting fellow at Yale University. She did her PhD in Weizmann under the supervision of Amir Pnueli, and worked many years in the industry in IBM Haifa Research Labs, and in Synopsys Inc. Dana’s research interests are in the area of formal methods in system design. She is mostly known for her work on PSL, the IEEE standard for property specification language, on which she received numerous awards from IEEE, IBM and Synopsys.