This course introduces students to classic and modern techniques for the automated testing and analysis of software systems for reliability, security, and performance. It covers both techniques and their applications in various domains (e.g., compilers, databases, theorem provers, operating systems, machine/deep learning, and mobile applications), focusing on the latest, important results.

This course uses compilers as examples to expose students to modern software development techniques. Tentative topics include: compiler organization; lexical analysis; top-down and bottom-up parsing; symbol tables; semantic analysis; code generation; local and global optimization; register allocation; automatic memory management.

This seminar is an opportunity to become familiar with current research in software engineering and more generally with the methods and challenges of scientific research.

The course is an introduction to research in software engineering, based on reading and presenting high quality research papers in the field. The instructor may choose a variety of topics or one topic that is explored through several papers.