Paper Requirement for Vassileos Koutavas

1. Paper: Smaller Bisimulations for Reasoning About Higher-Order Imperative Programs. Submitted to ICFP 2005.

2. Description: Sumii and Pierce have recently introduced a new bisimulation method for proving the equivalence of higher-order functional programs. This paper extends this method to handle higher-order programs that manipulate a store. The method is a considerable improvement over the original, in that the bisimulations are easier to specify and the proof obligations are significantly lessened. The new method easily handles well-known examples for which existing methods are inapplicable or cumbersome.

3. Acceptance rate: Last year: 21/80 (26.2%)

4. Student's contribution to paper: Vassilis did almost all the technical work for the paper, and wrote the technical sections.

5. URL for paper: ftp://ftp.ccs.neu.edu/pub/people/wand/papers/storebisim.pdf.

6. Why should this paper be accepted as qualifying the paper requirement: Although the paper is only submitted, it is quite substantial, and demonstrates Vassilis's capability for doing research.