Fred B. Schneider

Fred B. Schneider
Professor
fbs@cs.cornell.edu
Ph.D. State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1978

My research focuses on techniques to support construction of concurrent and distributed systems for high-integrity, mission-critical settings.

The TACOMA project-a collaboration involving Cornell and the University of Tromsų (Norway)-is studying the use of mobile processes, or agents, for structuring distributed systems. Agents are a promising new paradigm for implementing services in large, open, distributed systems, like the Internet. Work at Cornell on TACOMA has emphasized fault-tolerance. Joint with Y. Minsky, S. Stoller, and R. van Renesse, a number of solutions to the "agent-integrity problem" have been developed over the past year. Agents comprising an application must not only survive (possibly malicious) failures of the hosts they visit, but they must also be resilient to potentially hostile actions by other hosts. Replication and voting enable an application to survive some failures of the hosts it visits. However, even hosts that are not visited by agents can masquerade and confound a replica-management scheme. We want correctness of a computation to be independent of hosts that would not be visited in a failure-free run, and we have developed protocols that use cryptographic techniques in novel ways for this purpose.

I have also been heavily involved in developing approaches for assertional reasoning about systems, since this is one way to gain confidence that a component satisfies its specification. I succeeded in identifying ways that assertional reasoning can drive the design of a distributed program. David Gries and I continue investigating first-order equational logics and the calculational-style of proof. This year, we studied the handling of undefined terms (i.e. partial functions) and developed an axiomatization for Dijkstra's "everywhere" operator.

Awards

Professor-at-Large, University of Tromsų, Tromsų, Norway

University Activities

Member: College of Engineering Affirmative Action Committee; Computer Science Faculty Recruiting Committee; Computer Science Computing Facilities Committee

Professional Activities

Editor-in-chief: Distributed Computing
Editor: Information Processing Letters; IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering; High Integrity Systems; Annals of Software Engineering; ACM Computing Surveys
Co-Editor: Texts and Monographs in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag
Program Committee Member: 4th International School and Symposium Formal Techniques in Real Time and Fault Tolerant Systems; Fifth IFIP Working Conference on Dependable Computing for Critical Applications; Sixteenth IEEE International Real-Time Systems Symposium; DIMACS Workshop on Verification and Control of Hybrid Systems; ACM SIGSOFT '96 Fourth Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
Steering Committee: Center for High Integrity Software Systems Assurance (CHISSA); National Institute of Standards and Technology; Information Systems Trustworthiness; Computer Science and Telecommunications Board; National Research Council; National Academy of Sciences
Member: ARPA ISAT Defensive Information Warfare Study Group; ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award Committee
Co-Organizer: Dagstuhl Seminar on Time Services; Dagstuhl Seminar on Mobile Agents
Organizer: IFIP Working Group 2.3 Meeting
Member: IFIP Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology).

Lectures

Survivable distributed information systems. Defense Science Board. Fort Meade, MD, May 1996.
Ensuring agent integrity. University of Tromsų. Tromsų, Norway, May 1996.
Adding fault-tolerance, virtually. University of Tromsų. Tromsų, Norway, May 1996.
Computer science at Cornell. Kodak Research Center. Rochester, NY, March 1996.
Research on fault-tolerant and real-time distributed computing. National Academy of Sciences Mathematics Board, Review of AFOSR. Washington, DC, February 1996.
(Mis)Adventures with AAS: My experiences. MIT/LCS Principles of Computer Systems Seminar Series. Cambridge, MA, February 1996.
The TACOMA project: Theory and practice of exploiting agents. ARPA Formal Methods PI Meeting. San Diego, CA, January 1996.
ISAT study: Defensive information warfare. ARPA Formal Methods PI Meeting. San Diego, CA. January 1996.
Panelist: Do hollow computers make sense? Fifteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. Copper Mountain Resort, CO, December 1995.
Fault-tolerant distributed systems. 3-Day Short Course, SAIC. San Diego, CA, December 1995. (with Keith Marzullo).
Adding fault-tolerance virtually. Carnegie-Mellon University. Pittsburgh, PA, November 1995.
Adding fault-tolerance virtually. Washington University. St. Louis, MO, October 1995.
ISAT defensive information warfare study. ARPA Workshop on Architecture Definition Languages and Security. Institute for Defense Analysis, VA, October 1995.
Defensive information warfare. ARPA ISAT Status Briefing. Woods Hole, MA, August 1995.
Placing agents on airplanes: Potential and problems. CSTO Joint PI Meeting. Fort Lauderdale, FL, July 1995.
Formal methods and the ARPA-ISAT defensive information warfare study. CHISSA steering committee meeting. National Institute of Standards and Technology. Gaithersburg, MD, July 1995.
Reasoning when terms are partial. IFIP WG2.3 Meeting. Ithaca, NY, July 1995.

Publications

Hypervisor-based fault tolerance. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 14, 1 (Feb. 1996), 80-107 (with T. Bressoud).
A role for formal methodists. Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerant Systems 9 (eds. F. Cristian, G. LeLann, T. Lunt), Springer-Verlag, 1995, 43-45.
Avoiding the undefined by underspecification. In Jan van Leeuwen (ed.), Computer Science Today. LNCS 1000, Springer-Verlag, 1995, 366-373 (with D. Gries).
Hypervisor-based fault tolerance. Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Operating Systems Review 29, 5 (Copper Mountain Resort, Colorado, Dec. 1995), 1-11 (with T. Bressoud).
Teaching math more effectively, through the design of calculational proofs. The Mathematical Monthly (October 1995), 691-697 (with D. Gries).
Faster possibility detection by combining two approaches. Proceedings 9th International Workshop, WDAG '95, (Le Mont-Saint-Michel, France, Sept. 1995). LNCS 972, Springer-Verlag, 1995, 318-332 (with Scott Stoller).
Avoiding AAS mistakes. Proceedings of the Air Traffic Management Workshop (eds. L. Tobais, M. Tashker, A. Boyle). NASA Conference Publication 10151, NASA Ames Research Center, 133-149.

Patent

Fault tolerant computer system with shadow virtual processor. United States patent number 5,488,716, Jan. 30, 1996. Co-inventors: E. Balkovich, B. Lampson, and D. Thiel.

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