CS&E Colloquium: Program Testing with Polymorphic Types

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

This week's speaker, Favonia (University of Minnesota), will be giving a talk titled "Program Testing with Polymorphic Types."

Abstract

Many programming languages allow programmers to write polymorphic programs that work for data of different types, which significantly reduces code duplication. What is less known is that polymorphic programs are also easier to test if correct techniques are applied. The intuition is that fewer programs are polymorphic, and thus lesser testing is needed to distinguish correct programs from incorrect ones. The ignorance of a program about its input data is its greatest strength.

In this talk, I will discuss techniques for testing polymorphic programs, including the recent progress made by my student Zhuyang Wang and me.

Biography

Favonia is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. They received their Ph.D. in 2017 from Carnegie Mellon University. Their main research interest is the correctness of programs and mathematical proofs, and they have been working on proof mechanization, type theory, programming language theory, and property-based testing.