ProofCert: Broad Spectrum Proof Certificates
ProofCert is the name of an ERC Advanced Grant awarded to Dale Miller for the five years 2012-2016. This 2.2 million euro grant will finance several PhD students and Post Docs as well as fund visiting collaborators. The following is taken from the proposal’s abstract.
The ProofCert proposal aims at building a foundation that will allow a broad spectrum of formal methods—ranging from automatic model checkers to interactive theorem provers—to work together to establish formal properties of computer systems. This project starts with a wonderful gift to us from decades of work by logicians and proof theorist: their efforts on logic and proof has given us a universally accepted means of communicating proofs between people and computer systems. Logic can be used to state desirable security and correctness properties of software and hardware systems and proofs are uncontroversial evidence that statements are, in fact, true. The current state-of-the-art of formal methods used in academics and industry shows, however, that the notion of logic and proof is severely fractured: there is little or no communication between any two such systems. Thus any efforts on computer system correctness is needlessly repeated many time in the many different systems: sometimes this work is even redone when a given prover is upgraded. In ProofCert, we will build on the bedrock of decades of research into logic and proof theory the notion of proof certificates. Such certificates will allow for a complete reshaping of the way that formal methods are employed.
A technical description is available.
News
- INRIA has announced this award: French and English.
- On 18 November 2011, Miller presented ProofCert to the Scientific Council of INRIA with these slides.
- Two internships are propose for Spring 2012. These can lead to a PhD supported by this grant.
