Jade Alglave

Jade Alglave

Advertising uses love to sell stuff, like nylons. It also uses the word "love" in trivialising ways -- do you "love" your oven? When I hear about trust in the context of AI, especially agentic, I hope we don't do to trust what advertising has done to love. But what is trust? Can we discuss it in actionable and measurable ways in the context of AI? Thus I suggest a number of "trust pillars", hoping to start a communal conversation, across computing and beyond, to civil society. I also suggest that agentic systems may be a blessing in disguise, as we may be able to turn their explicit interfaces into "trust vectors".

Simon Gay, Jade Alglave

PLACES 2015 (full title: Programming Language Approaches to Concurrency- and Communication-Centric Software) is the eighth edition of the PLACES workshop series. After the first PLACES, which was affiliated to DisCoTec in 2008, the workshop has been part of ETAPS every year since 2009 and is now an established part of the ETAPS satellite events. PLACES 2015 was held on 18th April in London, UK. The workshop series was started in order to promote the application of novel programming language ideas to the increasingly important problem of developing software for systems in which concurrency and communication are intrinsic aspects. This includes software for both multi-core systems and large-scale distributed and/or service-oriented systems. The scope of PLACES includes new programming language features, whole new programming language designs, new type systems, new semantic approaches, new program analysis techniques, and new implementation mechanisms. This volume consists of revised versions of the papers that were presented at the workshop.

Jade Alglave, Daniel Kroening, Vincent Nimal et al.

Modern architectures rely on memory fences to prevent undesired weakenings of memory consistency. As the fences' semantics may be subtle, the automation of their placement is highly desirable. But precise methods for restoring consistency do not scale to deployed systems code. We choose to trade some precision for genuine scalability: our technique is suitable for large code bases. We implement it in our new musketeer tool, and detail experiments on more than 350 executables of packages found in Debian Linux 7.1, e.g. memcached (about 10000 LoC).

Jade Alglave, Daniel Kroening, Vincent Nimal et al.

Despite multiprocessors implementing weak memory models, verification methods often assume Sequential Consistency (SC), thus may miss bugs due to weak memory. We propose a sound transformation of the program to verify, enabling SC tools to perform verification w.r.t. weak memory. We present experiments for a broad variety of models (from x86/TSO to Power/ARM) and a vast range of verification tools, quantify the additional cost of the transformation and highlight the cases when we can drastically reduce it. Our benchmarks include work-queue management code from PostgreSQL.