On the Importance of Program Representations in Static Analysis

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "On the Importance of Program Representations in Static Analysis"

by

Mr. Xiao XIAO


Abstract:

Static analysis is a set of automatic or semi-automatic techniques to gather 
the semantic knowledge of a program without executing it. An important kind of 
semantic knowledge is the control flow and data flow information, which 
characterizes the instruction execution paths and the data 
generation/consumption paths, respectively. The obtained information is encoded 
in various graphical data structures or in the program itself directly for 
subsequent use. These data structures or instrumented programs are called 
program representations. In this survey, we first study four data structures 
that can help us dissect the code structure and dig deep structural properties. 
Then, we discuss the popular representations used in contemporary compiler, the 
single static assignment (SSA) form and its variants, which enable efficient 
program analysis algorithms by exploiting the sparsity of the data flow 
problem. We believe our surveyed knowledge can shed light to our future work.


Date:			Tuesday, 5 February 2013

Time:                   10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 4480
                        lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Charles Zhang (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Qiong Luo (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung
 			Dr. Sunghun Kim


**** ALL are Welcome ****