Abstract

Even with impressive advances in automated formal methods, certain problems in system verification and synthesis remain challenging.

Examples include the verification of quantitative properties of software involving constraints on timing and energy consumption, and the automatic synthesis of systems from specifications. The challenges mainly arise from three sources: environment modeling, incompleteness in specifications, and the complexity of underlying decision problems.

In this talk, I will present SCIDUCTION , a methodology to tackle these challenges. Sciduction combines inductive inference (learning from examples), deductive reasoning (such as SAT /SMT solving), and structure hypotheses.

We have demonstrated several applications of sciduction including timing analysis of embedded software, synthesis of loop-free programs, synthesis from temporal logic (LTL), term-level verification of hardware (RTL) designs, and switching logic synthesis of hybrid systems. This talk will present some core theory, a couple of illustrative applications, and directions for future work.