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Hello all,<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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[Apologies for multiple postings.]<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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I am looking for a PhD student who is interested in the analysis of <span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">concurrent or distributed programs, start date in October </span><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">2021. A summary of possible research projects
is given below and </span><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">details about my research group can be found </span><a href="https://vtss.doc.ic.ac.uk" class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">here</a><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">.</span></div>
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The deadline to apply for a PhD position in the Department is **19th <span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">March 2021**. A successful UK student will probably be funded through </span><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">the standard Departmental competition
for funds. A successful </span><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">EU/overseas student will probably be funded by a combination of </span><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">Departmental funding and my funding. In particular, I have additional </span><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">funding
which means that the EU/overseas students are able to go into </span><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">the same competition for funding as the UK students.</span></div>
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<div class="" style="margin: 0cm;"><font face="Calibri, sans-serif" class=""><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">Given these uncertain times, we will assess the situation about </span></font><span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">whether
it is necessary to start the position remotely nearer the </span><span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">time. The good news is that accommodation rents are currently low due </span><span class="" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">to
covid, with people in my group recently getting some excellent accommodation, </span><font face="Calibri, sans-serif" class=""><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">and so it is actually quite a good time to come to London. </span></font></div>
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<div class="" style="margin: 0cm;"><font face="Calibri, sans-serif" class=""><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">Please do not hesitate to contact me directly if interested, cc</span><span class="" style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">’</span><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">ing
my administrator Teresa Carbajo Garcia, cc'd</span><span class="" style="font-size: 11pt;">. </span></font></div>
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Best wishes,<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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Philippa<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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Professor Philippa Gardner FREng<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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Department of Computing<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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Imperial College <o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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180 Queen’s Gate<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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London<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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SW7 2AZ<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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Your working day may not be the same as mine. Please do not feel<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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obliged to reply to this email outside your normal working hours.<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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POSSIBLE PROJECTS<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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Gillian: Concurrency<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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Gillian [1,1a] is a multi-language platform for compositional symbolic analysis. It currently supports three flavours of analysis: whole-program symbolic testing; full verification based on separation logic; and automatic compositional testing based on bi-abduction.
It is underpinned by a core symbolic execution engine, parametric on the memory model of the target language, with strong mathematical foundations that unify symbolic testing and verification. Gillian has been instantiated to C and JavaScript, obtaining results
on real-world code that demonstrate the viability of our unified, parametric approach.<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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We have an ambitious project to design and implement Concurrent Gillian. It involves: changing the core of Gillian to handle concurrency; developing a Gillian instantiation for a small concurrent While language to explore different types of concurrency reasoning;
developing a Gillian instantiation for concurrent Rust which will build on the current development of a Gillian instantiation for sequential Rust; and exploring symbolic testing and verification for real-world Rust programs.<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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Concurrency<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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We have worked for many years on the compositional reasoning about concurrent programs, introducing fundamental techniques which underpin modern concurrent separation logics [2,2a]: logical abstraction; logical atomicity; and logical environment liveness properties.
We have applied our reasoning to verify some of the most advanced concurrent algorithms in the literature. There are several suitable PhD projects associated with this work: for example, continuing the work on the foundational theory; applying the work to
real-world libraries; developing prototype analysis tools; or using the Coq-focused Iris project, whose foundations use some of our theory.<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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Distribution<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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We have recently begun to work on weak consistency models for distribution, developing an interleaving operational semantics for client-observational behaviour of atomic transactions [5]. Possible PhD projects include: creating a program logic for distributed
atomic transactions (our original motivation for the work) inspired by our previous work on program logics for concurrency; or further developing the operational semantics with the aim to provide prototype tools for proving robustness results and discovering
litmus tests. <o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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References<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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[1] Gillian, Part 1: A Multi-language Platform for Symbolic Execution, Jose Fragoso Santos, Petar Maksimovic, Sacha-Elie Ayoun and Philippa Gardner, PLDI'2020. Part 2 on verification and bi-abduction is being written now. We have given a talk on Gillian at
the conference Rebase, associated with ECOOP/OOPSLA, in November 2020, and at Facebook's Testing and Verification Symposium (FaceTAV), in December 2020. <o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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[1a] Gillian Verification for JavaScript and C, Petar Maksimovic, Sacha-Elie Ayoun, Jose Fragoso Santos and Philippa Gardner, submitted, draft available upon request. <o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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[2] A Perspective on Specifying and Verifying Concurrent Modules, Thomas Dinsdale-Young, Pedro da Rocha Pinto and Philippa Gardner, Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming, 2018.<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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[2a] TaDA Live: Compositional Reasoning for Termination of Fine-grained Concurrent Programs, Emanuele D’Osualdo, Azadeh Farzan, Philippa Gardner and Julian Sutherland, submitted for journal publication 2020, draft available upon request.<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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[3] Data Consistency in Transactional Storage Systems: a Centralised Approach, Shale Xiong, Andrea Cerone, Azalea Raad and Philippa Gardner, ECOOP'20.</div>
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