Philippa's lecture "Tracking Program Footprints" is now available for you to see online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrCnPKPAbmA.

Tracking Program Footprints

Professor Philippa Gardner's inugaral lecture  "Tracking Program Footprints" given on the 10th October can now be seen online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrCnPKPAbmA an abstract of the lecture and a short biography ca be seen below.

Abstract:

We cannot yet guarantee what computers do. Our understanding of programs has not kept pace with their increasing complexity: software licences give no guarantees; simple program errors turn into major attacks; web apps make your browser hang; and concurrent programs are too difficult to write.
 
Mathematical reasoning techniques could provide guarantees about what programs do. However, such techniques are only just beginning to scale to large programs. I will talk about resource reasoning, whose pivotal concept is the idea of ‘footprints’. A footprint identifies the essential memory used by a program, which can be separated from the untouched memory, enabling the reasoning to scale.
 
I will introduce abstract resource reasoning, focusing on abstract footprints such as sets and web pages, rather than the spaghetti-like memory used by the program. Abstraction provides a ‘fiction of separation’, widening the scope of resource reasoning to web apps and complex concurrent programs.

Biography:

Gardner’s research is notable for spanning many areas of computer science: verification, web programs, shared-memory concurrency, message-passing concurrency, logic and type theory. She obtained her PhD, supervised by Professor Gordon Plotkin FRS, at Edinburgh in 1992, moved to Cambridge in 1997 on an EPSRC Advanced Fellowship to work with Professor Robin Milner FRS, became a lecturer at Imperial in 2000, was awarded a Microsoft Research Cambridge/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellowship at Imperial in 2005, and became a professor in 2009.
 
She currently has an EPSRC programme grant with Professor Peter O’Hearn and others on ‘resource reasoning’. O’Hearn led the famous ‘East London Massive’ at Queen Mary for many years. Less widely advertised, Gardner led the ‘West London Tree Huggers’ at Imperial, so called due to her work on tree memory (web memory, file systems) and her tendency to work with wonderful researchers with substantial amounts of hair.