Compositionality and modularity in embedded system design: Interface synthesis and interface theories by Stavros Tripakis. Monday, February 14th, 4:00 pm, Jacobs Believed in Me Auditorium.

Compositional methods, that allow the assembly of smaller components into larger systems both efficiently and correctly, are not simply a desirable feature in system design: they are a must for designing large and complex systems. In this talk I will present some recent work on this general theme in the context of embedded systems. In particular, I will present work on modular code generation from hierarchical synchronous and dataflow models. The keys to solving the modular code generation problem turn out to be (1) the concept of interfaces as abstractions of blocks and (2) automatic synthesis of interfaces of composite blocks from interfaces of their sub-blocks. I will also discuss interface theories: they go one step further by introducing a refinement relation. Refinement captures substitutability: when can a component be replaced by another one without compromising the properties of the entire system. I will discuss two such theories: synchronous relational interfaces, targeted at synchronous systems and functional properties; and actor interfaces, targeted at dataflow models and performance properties such as throughput or latency.

Bio:

Stavros Tripakis is an Associate Researcher at UC Berkeley. He obtained a PhD degree in Computer Science at the Verimag Laboratory in Grenoble, France, in 1998. He was a postdoc at UC Berkeley from 1999 to 2001, a CNRS Research Scientist at Verimag from 2001 to 2006, and a Research Scientist at Cadence Research Labs in Berkeley from 2006 to 2008. His work lies in the areas of embedded, real-time and distributed systems, model-based and component-based design, verification, testing and synthesis. Dr. Tripakis was the co-Chair of the 10th International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT 2010) and is the current Secretary/Treasurer of ACM SIGBED.