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.
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Tue 16 JunDisplayed time zone: Mountain Time (US & Canada) change
09:00 - 10:05 | |||
09:00 15mTalk | Welcome and logistics Tom Ball @ Sixty Satish Chandra Meta Platforms, Inc., Shuvendu K. Lahiri Microsoft Research, Mayur Naik University of Pennsylvania, Byron Cook Amazon, Madan Musuvathi Microsoft Research | ||
09:15 25mTalk | Recollections from SLAM-ming with Tom Tom Ball @ Sixty Sriram Rajamani Microsoft Research Indua | ||
09:40 25mTalk | Testing, Verification, and Measurement --- Tom's still open challenge Tom Ball @ Sixty Madan Musuvathi Microsoft Research | ||
10:10 - 10:40 | |||
10:10 30mCoffee break | Break Catering | ||
10:40 - 12:20 | |||
10:40 25mTalk | From Bebop to Constrained Horn Clauses Tom Ball @ Sixty Nikolaj Bjørner Microsoft Research | ||
11:05 25mTalk | Research in Three-Part Harmony Tom Ball @ Sixty Todd Millstein University of California, Los Angeles | ||
11:30 25mTalk | Riffing on some themes from Tom: Driver Verification, Testing, Abstraction & Theorem Proving Tom Ball @ Sixty Nikhil Swamy Microsoft Research | ||
11:55 25mTalk | The SLAM "GiveUp" Tom Ball @ Sixty Rahul Kumar Amazon | ||
12:20 - 13:40 | |||
12:20 80mLunch | Lunch Catering | ||
13:40 - 15:20 | |||
13:40 25mTalk | Ju-jitsu with Ball-Larus (& Melski-Reps) or "We will publish no algorithm before its time" Tom Ball @ Sixty Thomas Reps University of Wisconsin-Madison | ||
14:05 25mTalk | Interdisciplinary Genius in the 21st Century: The Case of Tom Ball Tom Ball @ Sixty Mooly Sagiv Certora, inc. | ||
14:30 25mTalk | Having a Ball with Tom since 1994 Tom Ball @ Sixty Patrice Godefroid Microsoft, USA | ||
14:55 25mTalk | The Question That Launched a Thousand Derivatives Tom Ball @ Sixty Margus Veanes Microsoft Research | ||
15:20 - 15:50 | |||
15:20 30mCoffee break | Break Catering | ||
15:50 - 17:30 | |||
15:50 25mTalk | Tracing the Ball-istic Trajectory of My Research: From Randoop to FastF, Memory Models and Semantic Merging Tom Ball @ Sixty Shuvendu K. Lahiri Microsoft Research | ||
16:15 25mTalk | Tom and the evolution of abstraction Tom Ball @ Sixty Kenneth L. McMillan University of Texas at Austin | ||
16:40 5mTalk | Profiling, not Slicing, is the Path to Success (pre-recorded video) Tom Ball @ Sixty James Larus EPFL | ||
16:45 5mTalk | The BBC micro:bit revolution (pre-recorded video) Tom Ball @ Sixty Steve Hodges Lancaster University, UK | ||
16:50 30mTalk | Paths Converge: Software Model Checking for the BBC micro:bit Tom Ball @ Sixty Thomas Ball University of Washington (USA) and Lancaster University (UK) | ||
Presentations
A list of talks from Tom’s close collaborators over the years.
Satish ChandraCommittee Member
Meta Platforms, Inc.
United States
Byron CookCommittee Member
Amazon
United States
Shuvendu K. LahiriCommittee Member
Microsoft Research
United States
Madan MusuvathiCommittee Member
Microsoft Research
United States
Mayur NaikCommittee Member
University of Pennsylvania
United States
- No members yet