Tom Reps, President of GrammaTech, will give a keynote presentation titled WYSINWYX: What You See Is Not What You eXecute on Tuesday, July 21 at 9:00 a.m. at the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) conference. The ISSTA conference runs from July 19th-23rd, 2009 at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza in Chicago, Illinois. ISSTA is the leading research conference in software testing and analysis, bringing together academics and practitioners.
The keynote will summarize research on analyzing machine code that Reps has directed over the last several years. A variety of dynamic, static, and symbolic techniques will be described. While source-code analysis has received a lot of attention over the last few years, the analysis of executables directly is yielding new insight into program behavior. This is because computers do not execute source-code programs; they execute machine-code programs that are generated from source code. There have been a number of cases in which program flaws apparent in the executable were not visible in the program’s source code. Reps will describe how this can occur.
Dr. Reps received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1982. His work has concerned a wide variety of topics, including program slicing, dataflow analysis, pointer analysis, model checking, computer security, code instrumentation, language-based program-development environments, the use of program profiling in software testing, software renovation, incremental algorithms, and attribute grammars. His Ph.D. dissertation won the 1983 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. Reps has also been the recipient of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1986), a Packard Fellowship (1988), a Humboldt Research Award (2000), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2000). Reps is also an ACM Fellow (2005).
More information about ISSTA is available at www.cse.msu.edu/issta09/.
