Gul Agha: Building Dependable Concurrent Systems through Probabilistic Inference, Predictive Monitoring and Self-Adaptation

Abstract
The infeasibility of statically verifying complex software is well established; in concurrent systems, the difficulty is compounded by nondeterminism and the possibility of 'Heisenbugs'. Using runtime verification, one can not only monitor a concurrent systems to check if it has violated a specification, but potentially predict future violations.  However, a key challenge for runtime verification is that specifications are often incomplete.  I will argue that the safety of concurrent systems could be improved by observing patterns of interaction and using probabilistic inference to capture intended coordination behavior.  Actors reflecting on their choreography this way would enable deployed systems to continually improve their specifications.  Mechanisms to dynamically add monitors and enforce coordination constraints during execution would then facilitate self-adaptation in concurrent systems.  I will conclude by suggesting a program of research to extend runtime verification so systems can evolve robustness through such self-adaptation.

BIO

Gul Agha is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is in the area of programming models and languages for open distributed and embedded computation. Dr. Agha is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Meritorious Service Award, and the ACM Recognition of Service Award. He served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Parallel and Distributed Technology (1994-98) and of ACM Computing Surveys (1999-2007). His book on Actors, published by MIT Press, is among the most widely cited works. He has published over 150 research articles and supervised over 30 PhD dissertations. He is a co-founder of Embedor Technologies, providing solutions for infrastructure monitoring using sensor networks.