Satish Chandra

Co-developer of a methodology that allows programmers to leverage the oracle's help in writing complex programs, Chandra has worked extensively on program analysis, bug finding, and software verification.

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.

Chandra has been a member of the Programming Languages and Software Engineering Department at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York. His work has involved bug finding and verification tools, symbolic analysis, and synthesis of programs. For several years, he and his colleagues worked primarily on static bug finding and verification tools for Java. They were interested in detecting — or proving the absence of — a variety of defects such as null dereferences, resource leakage, and type-state errors.

The focus was on scalable inter-procedural analysis that could be applied to large bodies of code, and yet produced consumable results. They also did work on recovering implicit type-state specifications from code, and some of their work found its way into IBM (Rational) products. In more recent work, Chandra and his colleagues explored symbolic analysis for a variety of purposes, such as producing concrete demonstrations of an error report from an analysis engine.

In particular, they built an interactive tool, Snugglebug, that engaged the user to elicit method preconditions such that the execution of the method did not throw any exceptions. Snugglebug used 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 Identifying Security Vulnerabilities in Software Systems," IBM System Journal 2007, with M. Pistoia, S. Fink, and E. Yahav.