February 3, 2015
Aarti Gupta, an international leader in research on the formal verification of hardware and software systems, has joined the Princeton University Computer Science Department after two decades in the private sector. She became a full professor on Jan. 1.
One of Gupta’s primary goals is to help system developers manage the complexity of large software and hardware systems. “Inability to manage this complexity can slow the pace of innovation, result in economic loss, and in the worst cases lead to loss of life,” she says. “My research relates to managing this complexity through formal techniques for system analysis, with applications in improving design/development productivity and ensuring correctness.”
Prior to joining Princeton, Gupta was a department head at NEC Labs America, where she led a team in investigating new techniques for hardware and software analysis. These techniques help users answer fundamental questions about the systems they build. In essence, “Does your system do what it’s supposed to?” Answering such questions in their full generality is one of the grand challenges of computer science. To begin to tackle them, Gupta specifies desirable properties in formal logics and then designs algorithms capable of computing the answers with respect to given systems. Professor David Walker, a new colleague of Gupta’s at Princeton says “Gupta’s research really stands out for its ability to answer questions about software at scale. Many software analysis techniques will work if the goal is to analyze small or even medium-sized programs on the order of thousands or tens of thousands of lines. But how do you analyze the millions upon millions of lines of code that make up many modern applications? Before Gupta’s work on F-Soft, a platform for the analysis of massive C/C++ programs, I just wouldn’t have thought it would be possible.” Her research publications, including on this work, span over a hundred articles as well as a book, “SAT-based Scalable Formal Verification Solutions,” which was co-authored with M. K. Ganai.
Gupta received her Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1994 after earning a master’s degree in computer engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi.