PLDI 2026
Mon 15 - Fri 19 June 2026 Boulder, Colorado, United States
PLDI 2026 (series) / Tom Ball at Sixty 2026 (series) /

TB@60Tom Ball at Sixty 2026

We will be organizing a one-day event celebrating Tom Ball’s sixtieth birthday, in honor of his numerous foundational contributions to the field of Programming Languages, Formal Methods and Software Engineering. Tom and his collaborators have had deep impact on several research areas including scalable program analysis with path-profiling, industrial-scale program verification with SLAM, automated test generation with Randoop and empirical software engineering. Tom was also instrumental in investing in automated reasoning tools at Microsoft Research that has seen the birth of widely used Z3 and Lean tools. With microbit and MakeCode, his research has helped democratize physical computing and made it accessible to millions of students worldwide. Among his several test-of-time paper awards, two of them happen to be for his PLDI papers, so what better venue!

It will be held on June 16 at Boulder, Colorado, USA, co-located with PLDI’26

The event will consist of a collection of around 10-15 invited talks from past collaborators and researchers whose work has been deeply influenced by Tom’s research. Participation is welcome to anyone attending PLDI, especially young researchers who can interact and learn from Tom’s distinguished career path.

List of confirmed speakers

Speakers

# Speaker Affiliation Title
1 James Larus EPFL (emeritus) Profiling, not Slicing, is the Path to Success
2 Thomas Reps University of Wisconsin-Madison Ju-jitsu with Ball-Larus (& Melski-Reps) or ‘We will publish no algorithm before its time’
3 Todd Millstein UCLA Research in Three-Part Harmony
4 Mooly Sagiv Certora Interdisciplinary Genius in the 21st Century: The Case of Tom Ball
5 Patrice Godefroid Microsoft Having a Ball with Tom since 1994
6 Sriram Rajamani Microsoft Recollections from SLAM-ming with Tom
7 Madan Musuvathi Microsoft Research Testing, Verification, and Measurement – Tom’s still open challenge
8 Nikolaj Bjorner Microsoft Research From Bebop to Constrained Horn Clauses
9 Margus Veanes Microsoft Research The Question That Launched a Thousand Derivatives
10 Shuvendu Lahiri Microsoft Research Deconstructing Tom’s FastF algorithm in SLAM or ‘Randooping with Tom’

More coming …..

Organizing Committee
Program Committee
  • No members yet