Week 2 Activity: Colloquium talk @ Mudd
This week, Mudd hosts an in-person talk by Prof. Manu Sridharan, from UC Riverside, in Galileo McAlister on the Mudd campus. The talk begins at 4:15 PM on Thursday, but a reception with refreshments will be held outside at 4:00 PM.
For students enrolled in CS Colloquium (CS 195):
- If you’re in Section 1, we expect you to attend the event when it occurs (synchronously).
- If you’re in Section 2, we will try to have recorded video from the event afterwards.
Practical Elimination of Null Pointer Errors using Pluggable Types
Abstract
For many real-world applications, software reliability is of critical importance. At the same time, developers need to be able to move fast in developing new features and products. In this talk, I will describe my work on reducing the tension between these seemingly-conflicting needs, in the context of eliminating null pointer errors in Java code. First, I will present NullAway, a novel nullability type system for Java. NullAway improves on previous work by lowering overhead, so it can run on every build, and requiring fewer annotations while still finding most null-pointer errors in practice. Then, I will present recent work on automatic inference of NullAway annotations at scale. This work makes NullAway significantly easier to adopt for existing code bases, and it has already been applied to over 1.3 million lines of production code. NullAway and our inference tool are both publicly available.
About Manu Sridharan
Manu Sridharan is a Professor at University of California, Riverside, working in the areas of programming languages and software engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007, and he previously worked at IBM Research, Samsung Research, and Uber. His research has drawn on, and contributed to, techniques in static analysis, dynamic analysis, and program synthesis, with applications to security, software quality, code refactoring, and software performance. His work has been incorporated into multiple commercial and open-source products, including IBM's commercial security analysis tool and Uber's NullAway tool.
When and How to Attend
- Thursday, September 7
- Location: Galileo McAlister, Harvey Mudd College
- Optional reception begins at 4:00 PM
- Talk runs from 4:15–5:30 PM
Recording for Section 2
(You must be logged in to view this video.)
This video is provided for students in Section 2 of CS 195 (and students in Section 1 who had to miss the talk due to extenuating circumstances). This is a private video, so please do not share it with others.
Required Assessment
To receive credit for attending this colloquium, complete the assessment:
Please do so at your soonest convenience, within 24 hours of seeing the talk.
(When logged in, completion status appears here.)