The widespread deployment of computing devices that manage and control
physical processes in safety critical environments, has made their
analysis and verification a very important problem. Since formal
models that disregard the physical processes tend to be conservative
and suboptimal, the most popular way to model and analyze such systems
is using hybrid systems, that have finitely many control states to
model discrete behavior and finitely many real valued variables that
evolve continuously with time to model the interaction with the
physical world. Despite considerable progress in the last couple of
decades, the automated verification of cyberphysical systems remains
stubbornly challenging. Safety and stability are two important classes
of properties for cyberphysical systems. In this talk we will address
key foundational questions arising in the verification of such
properties and outline our approach based on analyzing system
simulations.
Mahesh Viswanathan obtained his bachelor's degree in computer science
from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1995, and his
doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. He was a
post-doctoral fellow at DIMACS with a joint appointment with Telcordia
Technologies in 2000-01. Since 2001, he has been on the faculty at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are
in the core areas of logic, automata theory, and algorithm design,
with applications to the algorithmic verification of cyberphysical and
stochastic systems.