PIPages
Labs

Qirun Zhang

Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Computer Science·Early-career

Software we depend on every day can hide bugs. These are hard to find, and the tools developers use can be wrong themselves.

Fields

Computer Science

Topics

program analysis

static analysis

software reliability

Grants
2 known grants, through Jun 2028

What they work on

  1. Characterize what the InterDyck graph abstraction can and cannot express. This is a graph model of programs with matched-edge patterns that represents program meaning for analysis.
  2. Develop efficient demand-driven and exhaustive algorithms for InterDyck-reachability. They answer whether one program point can reach another, to enable precise and scalable program analysis.
  3. Generate test programs that reveal incorrect debug information produced by optimizing compilers, the tools that translate and speed up source code.
  4. Produce comprehensive sequences of debugger actions to check compiler debug information on these test programs. Extend the validation techniques to multiple programming languages.

More about the research

Program analysis is the field of automatically reasoning about what a program will do. Analysis tools are used for testing, bug finding and quality assurance. Exact analysis is mathematically impossible in general, however, so practical tools approximate and can be imprecise. The research covers two related problems. The first is building more precise theoretical foundations for program analysis. The second is checking that compilers, the programs that translate source code into machine code, give debuggers correct information.

Why it matters

Reliable software underpins nearly everything society relies on. More precise and scalable program analysis could help developers find bugs before software is released. Validating compiler debug information could let developers trust their debuggers when fixing optimized code that is already in use. This could indirectly improve the quality of the software everyone relies on.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

CAREER: Program Analysis with Precise Abstractions

NSF · Jul 2023 – Jun 2028

SHF:Small: Debug Information Validation for Optimizing Compilers

NSF · Oct 2021 – Sep 2026

Closest labs

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Identify hidden relationships among the configuration options of Android taint analysis tools, and present them in a unified, configuration-aware interface that makes tuning easier.

Xiaokang Qiu

Purdue University, IN·Computer Science·Early-career

Develop program synthesis algorithms that infer objective functions, library models and task decomposition themselves, so programmers need not hand-craft them, enabling scalable library-based synthesis.

Zachary Tatlock

University of Washington, WA·Computer Science

Speed up and extend the egg equality saturation library with relational e-matching (faster searches for places to apply rules), sketch-based extraction for choosing the best program, and destructive rewriting to control e-graph blow-up.

The school

Georgia Institute of Technology: 50 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 572 research doctorates a year.

More about Georgia Institute of Technology

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