Steffen Smolka (Cornell CS Ph.D. ’19), Nate Foster (Cornell CS Associate Professor), Justin Hsu (former Cornell CS postdoc, now faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison), Tobias Kappé (University College London), Dexter Kozen (Joseph Newton Pew, Jr. Professor in Engineering and CS Professor), and Alexandra Silva (former Cornell CS postdoc, now faculty at UCL) received a distinguished paper award at the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL). POPL is the premier conference in theoretical programming languages.
The paper, “Guarded Kleene Algebra with Tests: Verification of Uninterpreted Programs in Nearly Linear Time,” describes an efficient fragment of Kleene Algebra with Tests, an algebraic system (invented by Kozen) that can be used to reason about a wide variety of computing systems.
The paper is dedicated to Laurie Hendren who received her Ph.D. from the Cornell CS department in 1990 and had a distinguished career as a faculty member at McGill University. She passed away in May 2019 after a long battle with cancer.