Moshe Vardi

George Distinguished Service Professor Rice University

Moshe Y. Vardi is a University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. He is the author and co-author of over 600 papers, as well as two books. He is the recipient of several scientific awards, is a fellow of several societies and a member of several honorary academies, and he holds multiple honorary doctorates. He is a Senior Editor of Communications of the ACM, the premier publication in computing.

The Siren Song of Temporal Synthesis

September 03 4:15 pm - 5:15 pm (CEST)

One of the most significant developments in the area of design verification over the last three decade is the development of algorithmic methods for verifying temporal specification of finite-state designs. A frequent criticism against this approach, however, is that verification is done after significant resources have already been invested in the development of the design. Since designs invariably contains errors, verification simply becomes part of the debugging process. The critics argue that the desired goal is to use temporal specification in the design development process in order to guarantee the development of correct designs. This is called temporal synthesis. In this talk I will review 60 years of research on the temporal synthesis problem, describe the automata-theoretic approach developed to solve this problem, and describe both successes and failures of this research program.