Neha Rungta, a PhD student in Computer Science from Mumbai, India, recently published in FMCAD, a top-tier venue for formal methods bringing together top researchers in academia and industry from all over the world. 

Neha’s research focuses on freeing software systems from critical errors before they are implemented in the real world.  Although this is necessary in all systems, it becomes critical in applications such as passenger scheduling for airlines, subway train routings, and circuit designs, among others.  Traditionally, two methods for finding errors in software systems have been used.  On one end of the spectrum, ad hoc testing methods are used.  This method reveals some errors but often fails to detect subtle errors embedded in complex systems.  On the other end of the spectrum, formalized techniques can be used to enumerate all possible program conditions.  However, as software has become increasingly complex, it is often not even remotely feasible to enumerate all possible program conditions with current levels of computing power.  Neha’s research, however, has extended the formalized and automated approach with the development of an algorithm which traces the path of a program where errors are likely to be found, rather than enumerating all of the possible conditions.  This approach makes error discovery feasible, and test results show that the algorithm decreases the amount of time and memory needed to find the errors.  Thus, software engineers are able to correct errors before systems are deployed and can prove the correctness of large software systems. 

Neha graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in December 2004 and received her Masters degree in Computer Science from BYU in December 2006. She is currently a PhD candidate working in the Formal Verification Lab in the Computer Science Department under her advisor, Dr. Eric Mercer.  Her peer-reviewed research, titled An “Improved Distance Heuristic Function for Directed Software Model Checking,” was co-authored by Dr. Eric Mercer and is published in the proceedings of FMCAD 2006.