Looking Backward; Looking Forward

The future of robotics raises important questions for humanity. Will robots be able to act as agents in their own right and make moral and ethical decisions? Impressive advances in artificial intelligence mean robots may become capable of replacing human beings in every task imaginable. What are the ethical implications of such a development? How do we prepare for such a future? Questions on the ethics and morality of robotics were debated by panelists specializing in ethics, law, computer science, data security and privacy, in the Oxford Union Debating Chamber.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) uses and develops tools based on formal verification to reason about the security of AWS itself, as well as the security of systems that customers build on AWS. This talk will focus on how AWS services connect customers to logic-based techniques, as well as how AWS uses formal verification internally to provide higher assurance of its security.

George Gonthier delivers a lecture at FLoc2018

An invited talk by the Emeritus Hillman University Professor of Computer Science, Philosophy and Mathematical Logic at Carnegie Mellon University at FLoC2018

In this talk I will describe what is known about pseudo-deterministic algorithms in the sequential, sub-linear and parallel setting. Probabilistic algorithms for both decision and search problems can offer significant complexity improvements over deterministic algorithms. One major difference, however, is that they may output different solutions for different choices of randomness. This makes correctness amplification impossible for search algorithms and is less than desirable in setting where uniqueness of output is important such as generation of system wide cryptographic parameters or distributed setting where different sources of randomness are used. Pseudo-deterministic algorithms are a class of randomized search algorithms, which output a unique answer with high probability. Intuitively, they are indistinguishable from deterministic algorithms by a polynomial time observer of their input/output behavior. In this talk I will describe what is known about pseudo-deterministic algorithms in the sequential, sub-linear and parallel setting. We will also describe an extension of pseudo-deterministic algorithms to interactive proofs for search problems where the verifier is guaranteed with high probability to output the same output on different executions, regardless of the prover strategies. Based on joint work with Goldreich, Ron, Grossman and Holden.

Formal reasoning about programs is one of the oldest and most fundamental research directions in computer science. It has also been one of the most elusive. There has been a tremendous amount of valuable research in formal methods, but rarely have formal reasoning techniques been deployed as part of the development process of large industrial codebases. This talk describes work in continuous reasoning, where formal reasoning about a (changing) codebase is done in a fashion which mirrors the iterative, continuous model of software development that is increasingly practiced in industry. We suggest that advances in continuous reasoning will allow formal reasoning to scale to more programs, and more programmers. We describe our experience using continuous reasoning with large, rapidly changing codebases at Facebook, and we describe open problems and directions for research for the scientific community. This a paper with the same title accompanying this talk appears in the LICS’18 proceedings.