Dr. Satish Chandra

He obtained a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997, and a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur in 1991, both in Computer Science. From 1997 to 2002, he was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories, where his research focused on program analysis, domain-specific languages, and data-communication protocols. In September 2002, he joined IBM Research in New Delhi, India, where he managed a small research group in software engineering. He is currently a member of Programming Languages and Software Engineering Department at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York. His current work involves bug finding and verification tools, symbolic analysis, and synthesis of programs. For the past few years, he and his colleagues have been working primarily on static bug finding and verification tools for Java. They have been interested in detecting (or proving absence of) a variety of defects such as null dereferences, resource leakage and type-state errors. The focus has been on scalable inter-procedural analysis that can be applied to large bodies of code, and yet produces consumable results. They have also done work on recovering implicit type-state specifications from code and some of their work has found its way in IBM (Rational) products. In more recent work, they have been playing with symbolic analysis for a variety of purposes, such as producing concrete demonstrations of an error report from an analysis engine. In particular, they have been building an interactive tool, Snugglebug, that engages the user to elicit method preconditions such that the execution of the method does not throw any exceptions. Snugglebug uses weakest precondition computation to reason about programs. Most of his publications are available on the ACM Digital Library, and include: "Effective Interprocedural Resource Leak Detection" ICSE 2010 with E. Torlak; and "A Survey of Static Analysis Methods for Idetifying Security Vulnerabilities in Software Systems", IBM System Journal 2007, with M. Pistoia, S. Fink and E. Yahav