Akash Lal

About

I am a member of the Systems Group at Microsoft Research India. I am broadly interested in all areas of programming languages, including program verification, design and analysis of concurrency in programs, and the application of AI towards solving software engineering problems. I am driven primarily by the need of building tools that help developers deal with the complexity of software. I graduated with a PhD from the Computer Sciences Department (opens in new tab)of University of Wisconsin-Madison (opens in new tab), advised by Tom Reps (opens in new tab).

I’ve had the pleasure of mentoring a few Research Fellows. (opens in new tab) They, along with their first engagement after leaving here, are: Ankush Das (opens in new tab) (CMU), Rashmi Mudduluru (opens in new tab) (U. Washington), Ajay Brahmakshatriya (opens in new tab) (MIT), Krishnan Govindraj (KU Leuven), Anmol Panda (U. Michigan), Sridhar Gopinath (U. Texas), Arun T (Industry), Samvid Dharanikota (CMU), Shrey Tiwari (CMU), Aniruddha Mysore (Georgia Tech), Aditya Senthilnathan (Cornell), Fahad Nayyar (Industry), Krut Patel (UIUC), Adharsh Kamath, Harshit Garg, Nausheen Mohammed.

Awards

• CAV Award (opens in new tab) for the introduction of context-bounded analysis and its application to the systematic testing of concurrent programs, 2023.
• EASST Best Software Science Paper Award, Industial-Strength Concurrency Testing with Coyote (opens in new tab), TACAS 2023.
• ACM Distinguished Paper Award, MonkeyDB: Effectively Testing Correctness Under Weak Isolation Levels (opens in new tab), OOPSLA 2021.
• ACM Distinguished Artifact Award, Learning-based Controlled Concurrency Testing (opens in new tab), OOPSLA 2020.
• Best Paper Award, Angelic Checking within Static Driver Verifier (opens in new tab), FMCAD 2020.
• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, Inferring Annotations For Device Drivers From Verification Histories (opens in new tab), ASE 2016.
• Best Paper Award, A Program Transformation for Faster Goal-Directed Search (opens in new tab), FMCAD 2014.
• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, Powering the Static Driver Verifier using Corral (opens in new tab), FSE 2014.
• ACM SIGPLAN Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award (opens in new tab), Interprocedural analysis and the verification of concurrent programs (opens in new tab), PhD Thesis, University of Wisconsin, 2009.

Service

I have served (or will serve) on several program committees: CAV 2024, VSTTE 2023, CAV 2023 (co-chair), PLDI 2023, POPL 2023, VSTTE 2022 (co-chair), PLDI 2022, FSE 2022, SAS 2021, FSE 2021, CAV 2021, PLDI 2020, CAV 2020, SAS 2019, CAV 2019, ECOOP 2019, POPL 2017, CAV 2016, TACAS 2016, CAV 2015, ICSE 2015, VMCAI 2015 (co-chair), ASE 2015 (ERC), EC2 2014 (co-chair), ASE 2014 (ERC), etc.