Wednesday / CS Seminar

February 25 / 12:00 PM

Hybrid / Mudd 3514

Speaker

Austin Mordahl, UIC

Talk Title

Challenges of Modern Static Analysis: Configuration, Flakiness and Testing

Abstract

"Static analysis tools are essential for catching bugs early in software development, yet decades of research have failed to overcome fundamental barriers to their adoption: complicated configuration, high false positive rates, and failure to detect real bugs. Despite the proliferation of sophisticated tools for determining program properties and advances in underlying techniques, these challenges continue to hinder widespread adoption and effective use in practice. In this talk, we will explore solutions to three persistent problems that plague modern static analysis: configuration complexity, flakiness, and testing. First, we'll examine approaches to reducing the steep learning curves around tool configuration, making it easier for developers to deploy static analyzers in their projects. Second, we'll investigate techniques for addressing flakiness: when analysis tools produce different results on identical code, undermining developer trust in their results. Finally, we'll discuss methods for testing static analysis tools themselves: validating that tools correctly determine the program properties they claim to compute.

Throughout the talk, we'll also examine how large language models are reshaping approaches to each of these challenges and consider their potential to fundamentally transform static analysis workflows. Attendees will gain practical insights into emerging solutions to long-standing problems and new research directions in making static analysis tools more reliable and accessible."

Biography

Austin Mordahl has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago since November 2024. Prior to this, he was a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Mordahl's research concerns automatic bug detection and static analysis, and he is especially interested in understanding and improving the performance of real-world static analysis tools. As a Ph.D. student, he was a recipient of the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship as well as the winner of the 2019 ACM Student Research Competition at ICSE.

Research Interests: Program analysis, software testing, software engineering

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