Building Better Systems
Building Better Systems
Galois, Joey Dodds, Shpat Morina
Exploring tools and approaches that make us more effective engineers and make our systems safe and reliable. Join us for discussions on recent developments in topics such as best practices in reliability and security, applied formal methods, encryption, and safe and secure hardware.
Episode #22: Eric Daimler — Guaranteeing the Integrity of Data Models with Category Theory
In this episode, we're joined by Eric Daimler, CEO & co-founder of Conexus AI, Inc, an MIT spin out. We discuss the Conexus software platform, which is built on top of breakthroughs in the mathematics of Category Theory, and how it guarantees the integrity of universal data models. Eric shares real-world examples of applying this approach to various complex industries, such as transportation and logistics, avionics, and energy. Listen to this episode wherever you listen to podcasts. Eric Daimler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericdaimler/ Joey Dodds: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joey-dodds-4b462a41/ Rob Dockins: https://galois.com/team/robert-dockins/ Galois, Inc.: https://galois.com/ Contact us: [email protected]
Aug 9, 2022
37 min
Episode #21: Nikhil Swamy — Fully In Bed With Dependent Types
Today we're joined by Nikhil Swamy, Senior Principal Researcher in the RiSE group at Microsoft Research. We are very excited to hear about what he's been working on. In particular, we're going discuss a language that he's co-created and continually develops called F* (pronounced F star). F* is a dependently typed language that you can both program and prove things about the programs that you write. We'll talk about what makes that language special and unique from other similar languages, as well as some of the applications of F*.
Jun 10, 2022
48 min
Episode #20: Ankush Desai — P: The Modeling Language That Could
Joey and Shpat talk with Ankush Desai, a Senior Applied Scientist at AWS and one of the primary developers behind the P language. They dig into uses for P, bug finding, and what it takes for formal methods researchers to build useful tools for applied engineers.
Apr 28, 2022
46 min
#19: Steve Weis — Security Shouldn't Be the Last Check Box
In this episode, we talk with Steve Weis, a Senior Staff Security Engineer at Databricks with extensive knowledge of security, cryptography, and software engineering. Steve shares his experience working for large companies like Google and Facebook and how their security needs differ from start-ups and companies trying to scale. He talks about why he thinks companies should share more about how they design their infrastructure and how they can develop a “security mindset” so even non-security-related roles can contribute to building secure systems.
Apr 14, 2022
41 min
#18: Jordan Kyriakidis — Helping People Write More Useful Requirements
In episode #18, we chat with Jordan Kyriakidis, co-founder and CEO of QRA Corp. QRA is developing QVScribe, a product that helps engineers write requirements and analyze those requirements to gauge whether they are framed well and capture the writer's intent. We discuss the impact of writing good, early-stage design requirements, how they impact your system, how to write better requirements, the state of natural language processing, and machine learning for this use case. We also talk about applying those in situations where you need explainability and where ambiguity is unacceptable.
Mar 9, 2022
47 min
#17: Iain Whiteside — The Twists and Turns of Validating Neural Networks for Autonomous Driving (Part 2)
In this two-part episode, we speak with Iain Whiteside about the challenges and some of the more novel solutions to make autonomous vehicles safer and easier to program. In part 1, we discuss how Ian and his team formalize and check the different actions and situations that a car finds itself in while on the road. In part 2, we discuss how you might validate the accuracy of neural networks that sense the world, and how to mitigate issues that might arise.
Feb 9, 2022
28 min
#16: Iain Whiteside – Autonomous Driving: Reasoning About the Rules of the Road (Part 1)
In this two-part episode, we speak with Iain Whiteside about the challenges and some of the more novel solutions to make autonomous vehicles safer and easier to program. In part 1, we discuss how Ian and his team formalize and check the different actions and situations that a car finds itself in while on the road. In part 2, we discuss how you might validate the accuracy of neural networks that sense the world, and how to mitigate issues that might arise.
Feb 9, 2022
56 min
#15: Dr. Kathleen Fisher – Sparking the New Age of Formal Verification at DARPA
In this episode, we chat with Dr. Kathleen Fisher, who was chair of the Computer Science department at Tufts University at the time of the interview. We talk about Kathleen’s experience in applying formal methods and PL theory to solve significant practical problems throughout her career. Equally important, we discuss how it came to be that she is practically a pro at golf!
Jan 10, 2022
55 min
#14: Leo de Moura — Combining the Worlds of Automated and Interactive Theorem Proving In Lean
In this episode, we talk with Leo de Moura, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. We’ll dive into his work on Lean, how goals for Lean have evolved, and who can use it. We also discuss how Leo was able to implement such a system without being a programming languages expert
Dec 3, 2021
45 min
#13: Rod Chapman – It's Either Automated or It's Wrong
Rod Chapman explains his recent verification of TweetNACL using SPARK/ADA. We discuss how every aspect of his proofs are automated, how the correctness proofs actually enabled better performance after compilation, and higher confidence in some otherwise risky-seeming optimizations.
Sep 24, 2021
44 min
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