adam.chlipala.netAdam Chlipala

Associate Professor of Computer Science Programming Languages & Verification Group (more PL at MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science MIT E-mail: adamc@csail.mit.edu Office: 32-G842 Contact Information - Publications [ BibTeX ] - CV: HTML , PDF Update on current status: I'm on sabbatical again June through December 2019, splitting my time between normal MIT activities and developing a startup company based on Ur/Web and UPO . We are empowering "normal folks" without programming training to create full-featured, database-backed web apps quickly. Watch this space for a link to the company web site when one exists! I'm in a transitional period, in terms of simple descriptions of my research interests. My traditional areas are programming languages and formal methods , but my interests have broadened to include other aspects of computer-system design and implementation. I like the idea of doing clean-slate redesign of computing stacks with current security and privacy concerns front-and-center, which I do believe involves, in a central way, my traditional focus of mechanized mathematical proofs , especially with the Coq proof assistant . However, I also spend a fair amount of time now thinking more generally about pleasant interfaces (e.g., hardware instruction sets, OS system-call interfaces, programming languages) and efficient implementations of hardware and software systems, including through tinkering with traditional boundaries between layers. I try to organize my research group as something like a startup company looking to produce one convincing unified demo of a clean-slate-ish full-stack, practical computer system. (Like startup companies, we expect to pivot often based on what we learn!) We are looking at simple embedded applications now, where the scope of machine-checked proofs and unified interface redesign reaches from RTL to relational specifications of network protocols. I'm interested in recruiting students to contribute. I do sometimes hire postdocs, though most of my recruiting strategy is centered on students (PhD, master's, undergrad). Ideal candidates have strong backgrounds in both rigorous mathematical reasoning and software/hardware systems implementation. There tends to be a bad match with students who use the word "theory" to describe their interests within programming languages or formal methods, to the point where our PhD program generally won't admit those people (they'd be better-served elsewhere!). Current MIT students interested in working together should e-mail me, while for others I suggest following our normal PhD application process. For a bit more info on what I work on, two low-time-investment overviews (of the mechanized-proofs part) are my blog post on the surprising security benefits of formal proofs and video of a talk I gave at the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in December 2017 . Current Research needs logo Unnamed (and somewhat incipient) umbrella project to build demonstration software/hardware systems with end-to-end mechanized proofs. I started my time as faculty developing the Bedrock library for verified multilanguage programming, but that project is largely over; we are working on a replacement project now that shares the name but makes very different design decisions, still supporting separation-logic-verified low-level programs (in a tasteful language, not C!) processed by a verified compiler, which I would like to use to explore alternative and drastically simplified OS-like functionality. The programming layer on top is meant to involve our Fiat system for automatic and correct-by-construction program derivation from specifications, which we are currently experimenting with using to generate code for practical network servers, a convenient domain for trying to make high-level programming more like relational-database programming but without the usual rough edges. Beneath the level of assembly language, we have work in the Kami project on modular hardware verification and verified compilation, where development is proceeding now jointly with industry, and where I'm especially interested in exploring alternative concurrency support in general-purpose processors. One of the cross-cutting focuses now is cryptography, including in our Fiat Cryptography project that centers on what is essentially a verified domain-specific compiler for finite-field arithmetic, which should soon be included in the build process for Google Chrome (to produce some of the code to validate SSL connections). FSCQ , a file system verified in Coq using a separation logic for reasoning about crash safety, mostly carried out these days by colleagues in the PDOS group The Science of Deep Specification , a National Science Foundation Expedition in Computing, 2016-2021, promoting similar full-stack-verification research to what I described above, but on more conventional architectures Some Old Research Ur/Web , a domain-specific functional programming language for modern Web applications. I started working on it when I was a grad student, and it's pretty much done research-wise, yielding a production-quality tool suite that a fair number of people enjoy using. Lambda Tamer , an umbrella library for the experiments in compiler verification that I started as a grad student. The most concrete outcome of the work was the parametric higher-order abstract syntax (PHOAS) encoding of program syntax, which we still put to use in many of my projects, where different kinds of compilers remain frequent ingredients in novel system designs. Research Students Postdocs PhD Jason Gross [since Summer 2012] Master's thesis: An Extensible Framework for Synthesizing Efficient, Verified Parsers Clément Pit--Claudel [since Spring 2014] Master's thesis: Compilation Using Correct-by-Construction Program Synthesis Joonwon Choi (coadvised with Arvind ) [since Fall 2014] Master's thesis: An Inlining Approach to Formal Hardware Semantics Thomas Bourgeat (coadvised with Arvind ) [since Spring 2016] Samuel Gruetter [since Fall 2017] Mirai Ikebuchi [since Fall 2017] Andres Erbsen [since Fall 2015] Master's thesis: Crafting Certified Elliptic Curve Cryptography Implementations in Coq Jade Philipoom [since Fall 2015] Master's thesis: Correct-by-Construction Finite Field Arithmetic in Coq Stella Lau [since Fall 2018] Edward Wang (coadvised with Saman Amarasinghe ) [since Fall 2019] Master's Zygimantas Straznickas [since Summer 2019] Undergraduate John Grosen [since Fall 2017] Shardul Chiplunkar [since Spring 2019] Áron Ricardo Perez-Lopez [since Spring 2019] Jasper Haag [since Fall 2019] Rachana Madhukara [since Fall 2019] Other Past students Teaching Spring 2020: 6.822: Formal Reasoning About Programs * (also Spring 2018, Spring 2017 [as 6.887], and Spring 2016 [as 6.887]) Spring 2019: 6.009: Fundamentals of Programming * (also Fall 2017 , Fall 2016 , and Fall 2015 [as 6.S04]) Spring 2015: 6.042: Mathematics for Computer Science (also Spring 2012) Fall 2014: 6.170: Software Studio Fall 2013: 6.820: Foundations of Program Analysis Spring 2013: 6.033: Computer Systems Engineering [recitation instructor] Fall 2012: 6.005: Software Construction Fall 2011: 6.892: Interactive Computer Theorem Proving * (An "*" indicates a class I [co]created.) Books Certified Programming with Dependent Types: A Pragmatic Introduction to the Coq Proof Assistant An introduction to the Coq proof assistant , assuming just familiarity with rigorous math and functional programming. Presents the techniques needed to scale to large formal developments in program verification and other domains, including scripted proof automation and expressive types for embedded programs. FRAP Formal Reasoning About Programs Introducing Coq simultaneously with semantics and program proof methods. Emphasizes commonalities through casting (almost) everything in terms of invariants on transition systems, with abstraction and modu...