People

Paul C. Attie Assistant Professor Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin
attie@ccs.neu.edu Personal Home Page

Professor Attie's research addresses the formulation of efficient methods and methodologies for the design, construction, and refinement of correct concurrent and distributed programs. He has formulated an efficient method for building correct finite-state concurrent programs. This method avoids state-explosion by analyzing the interactions of concurrent processes one pair at a time. Thus, the exponentially-large global state transition diagram does not need to be constructed.

Professor Attie has also extended the use of simulation relations so that they preserve liveness as well as safety properties. Thus, complex liveness properties may be refined in several stages, thereby greatly simplifying the task of verifying such properties.

Professor Attie is currently working on a formal model for dynamic computation. This model accommodates dynamic process creation and destruction, process migration, and dynamically changing external interfaces for a process. The model has well defined notions of composition of two subsystems, and of projection of a system onto a subsystem (a notion that is lacking in most current models of mobility). It supports program refinement, and verification of correctness using simulation relations. It is also compatible with the method for refining liveness properties discussed above.

Career Publication Highlights

P.C. Attie, ACM Symposium on the Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) 1999
Liveness-preserving simulation relations

P.C. Attie and E.A. Emerson, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 51-115, January 1998
Synthesis of concurrent systems with many similar processes

A. Arora, P.C. Attie, and E.A. Emerson, ACM Symposium on the Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) 1998
Synthesis of fault-tolerant concurrent programs (extended abstract)

Research Home Page