Abstract Interpretation

(3 Credits)

Prerequisites: Some facility with logic, sets, linear algebra, graphs, formal languages, mathematical proofs, and programming languages is expected. Many numerical or symbolic problems are very hard or even undecidable meaning that no computer algorithm can solve them exactly in reasonable time and memory space. This course introduces the latest techniques in abstract interpretation, a powerful framework for automatically calculating approximate solutions of such difficult problems. The main emphasis will be on software verification and automatic analysis with a wide range of applications from compilers to social networks.