Course Description
This course covers both foundations and practical aspects of the automated analysis of programs, which is becoming increasingly critical to find software errors and assure program correctness. The theory of abstract interpretation captures the essence of a broad range of program analyses and supports reasoning about their correctness. Building on this foundation, the course will describe program representations, data flow analysis, alias analysis, interprocedural analysis, dynamic analysis, and symbolic execution. Through assignments and projects, students will design and implement practical analysis tools that find bugs and verify properties of software.
This course fulfills the Logic and Languages constrained elective category for the Computer Science major as well as the Theoretical Foundations requirement of the Computer Science master's degree.
Why take this course?
- Explore the meaning of programs. One of the most basic questions that programmers ask is "What does this program do?" Program analysis is all about understanding programs--automatically!
- Learn deep theory. The theory of abstract interpretation stands with type theory as the most important and beautiful foundations of programming languages. Abstract interpretation is the fundamental theory of abstraction: how to precisely relate the concrete execution of a program to an abstraction of that execution. Naturally, this has many applications, which brings us to the third reason to take this course:
- Build awesome tools. Using program analysis, you can build tools that find bugs, prove important security and correctness properties, automatically generate useful tests, and much more--and you'll have a chance to do all of this in course assignments and a project that you can design yourself (if you want).
Logistics and People
Class: Tue/Thu 2:00 p.m. — 3:20 p.m. in
WEH 5328
Recitation: Fri 10:00 a.m. — 10:50 a.m. in
WEH 5320
Fall 2026
12 units
Office hours (Effective Sep. 21):
Tuesdays 3:30 p.m. — 4:30 p.m.
Wednesdays 2:00 p.m. — 3:00 p.m.
Location: TCS 360
Email: yiliangl@andrew.cmu.edu
Course Syllabus and Policies
The syllabus covers course learning objectives, supplemental textbooks, assessments, late work policy, and policies. Consult Canvas and especially Piazza for up-to-date announcements and discussion (links in header).
Schedule
We are still working to finalize the schedule for Fall 2026. The schedule below is a draft and is subject to significant change.
| Date | Topic | Reading/Material | HW Due | Optional Reading | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 25 | Introduction, Program Representation, and Syntactic Analysis | Text ch. 1 & 2 | PPA ch. 1 | ||
| Aug 27 | Program Semantics | Text ch. 3 | |||
| Aug 28 | recitation CodeQL | repo sol-ex1 sol-ex2 | |||
| Sep 1 | Program Semantics (cont.) | ||||
| Sep 3 | Program Semantics (cont.) | hw1 repo | PPA ch. 2 & 6 | ||
| Sep 4 | recitation Semantics | slides problems solutions | |||
| Sep 8 | Program Semantics (cont.) | ||||
| Sep 10 | Dataflow Analysis & Abstract Interpretation Framework | Text ch. 4 | PPA ch. 2.1 | ||
| Sep 11 | recitation HW3 setup; Dataflow Analysis Examples | ||||
| Sep 15 | Dataflow Analysis examples (cont.) |
hw2 (now due Tue.) pdf tex mathpartir |
PPA ch. 2.2—2.3 | ||
| Sep 17 | Termination and Correctness | Text ch. 6 | PPA ch. 2.3—2.4 | ||
| Sep 18 | recitation Data-Flow Analysis Correctness | ||||
| Sep 22 | Termination and Correctness |
hw3 (now due Tue.) pdf repo |
PPA ch. 2.5 | ||
| Sep 24 | Precision and Widening | Text ch. 7 | PPA ch. 2.5 | ||
| Sep 25 | recitation Dataflow analysis using Soot | hw4 (now due Fri.) | |||
| Sep 29 | Interprocedural analysis | Text ch. 8 | |||
| Oct 1 | Context-Sensitive Analysis | Text ch. 8 & ch. 10.2 | |||
| Oct 2 | recitation Midterm review | ||||
| Oct 6 | Pointer Analysis + Call Graphs for Object-Oriented Languages | Text ch. 10 | hw5 checkpoint | PPA ch. 3 | |
| Oct 8 | Midterm exam 1 | midterm | |||
| Oct 9 | no recitation | ||||
| Oct 12-16 | Fall Break; no classes | ||||
| Oct 20 | Intro to Hoare Logic | Text ch. 11 | |||
| Oct 22 | Verification using Hoare Logic | Text ch. 11 | hw5 | ||
| Oct 23 | recitation Hoare Logic Proofs using Axiomatic Semantics | ||||
| Oct 27 | Symbolic Execution | Text ch. 13 | |||
| Oct 29 | Concolic Testing | Text ch. 14 | hw6 | ||
| Oct 30 | recitation TBD | ||||
| Nov 3 | Democracy Day; no class | ||||
| Nov 5 | Satisfiability Modulo Theories | Text ch. 12 | hw7 | ||
| Nov 6 | recitation Intro to Z3 | ||||
| Nov 10 | Satisfiability Modulo Theories (cont.) | ||||
| Nov 12 | Program Synthesis | Text ch. 15 | project proposal |
||
| Nov 13 | recitation Simple synthesis using Z3 | ||||
| Nov 17 | TBD | ||||
| Nov 19 | TBD | hw8 | |||
| Nov 20 | recitation Midterm 2 review | ||||
| Nov 24 | Midterm exam 2 | midterm | |||
| Nov 26 | Thanksgiving Break; no class | ||||
| Nov 27 | No recitation | ||||
| Dec 1 | Dynamic Analysis (Fuzz Testing, Invariant Generation) | Text ch. 16 | |||
| Dec 3 | Review and Project Discussions | project checkpoint | |||
| Dec 4 | recitation Dynamic analysis on stack machine bytecode | ||||
| TBD | Project Presentations (Time & Location TBD) |
project final report |