2013-08-20: Seminar Sabelfeld (Chalmers University of Technology) on Tracking Information Flow in Web Applications

This talk discusses a principled approach to web application security through tracking information flow in web applications. Although the agile nature of developments in web application technology makes web application security much of a moving target, we show that there are some fundamental challenges and tradeoffs that determine possibilities and limitations of automatically securing web applications.

2013-07-29: Best Student Paper Award - APSys 2013
Aaron Carroll PhD Student won Student Best Paper at Asia Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys 2013) for the paper The Systems Hacker's Guide to the Galaxy: Energy Usage in a Modern Smartphone. This paper is co-authored with Gernot Heiser. More...

2013-04-24: Seminar Thiagarajan (National University of Singapore) on Approximate Verification of the Symbolic Dynamics of Markov Chains
A finite state Markov chain M can be viewed as a linear transform operating on the space of probability distributions over its set of nodes. We discretize the probability value space [0,1] into a finite set of intervals.

2013-04-23: Seminar Rushby (SRI International) on The Challenge of High-Assurance Software

It is difficult to build complex systems that (almost) never go (badly) wrong, yet this is what we expect of airplanes and pacemakers and the phone system. In essence, we have to anticipate everything that could fail or go wrong, develop countermeasures, and then provide compelling evidence that we have done all this correctly. Dr Rushby outline's some of the intellectual challenges in construction of suitable evidence, particularly as applied to software.

2013-04-19: Seminar Reeves (University of Waikato) on Modelling Safety Properties of Interactive Medical Systems

Formally modelling the software functionality and interactivity of safety-critical devices allows us to prove properties about their behaviours and be certain that they will respond to user interaction correctly. In domains such as medical environments, where many different devices may be used, it is equally important to ensure that all devices used adhere to a set of safety, and other, principles designed for that environment.