Amir Ben-Amram

The Size-Change-Termination Page summarizes my research on this method for program termination analysis.

A few research presentations:
slides from FOPARA 2013: Ranking Functions for Linear-Constraint Loops (corresponds to recent JACM paper with Samir Genaim).
slides from STACS 2013: Mortality of Iterated Piecewise Affine Functions over the Integers: Decidability and Complexity .

Other presentations:
Simple programs that are hard to analyze, a presentation in honour of Neil Jones on the occasion of the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award
and video

Publicly accessible demo progams:

• Online demo program of my work with Samir Genaim on ranking functions for linear-constraint loops. The associated paper is a SIGPLAN CACM Research Highlights Nomination.
• Download (for Windows) of a demo of the Decision algorithm polynomial (or linear) growth in bounded-loop programs.
  There is also a set of example programs. And another one.

Graduate projects

Undergraduate courses:

Graduate courses:

Material:

• Full text of My book that covers the material of the course Introduction to the Theory of Computation.

• A Turing-Machine Simulator (Java applet)

• WHILE Integrated Development Environment:
  A Windows-based interactive environment for experimenting with the WHILE language, a very simple programming language used for teaching theoretical concepts (inherited from Neil Jones's book on Computability and Complexity). This package will help students to absorb concepts of programming-language theory that we teach using this language as a vehicle.

• A humbler alternative is the following WHILE-language interpreter implemented in LISP.

Fritz Henglein's talk on an important topic: Also in static analysis, soundness is not enough.

There is nothing as practical as a good theory: Russ Cox's article on regular expression matching

Ian Parberry's referee's guide for theoretical computer science

Advice for session chairs in conferences

Integrity under attack: the state of scholarly publishing is an important article by Douglas N. Arnold, SIAM preseident, on the damages caused by article-counting and citation-counting (combined with the flaws of human nature, in particular greed).

Martin Tompa's famous article Figures of Merit, a (tongue in cheek) look at the ramifications of alphabetising authors' names, as is standard in Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science

Google Scholar

The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies

Zentralblatt MATH Database

SCIGEN: An Automatic Generator of Conference Papers and MathGen, for Mathematics journal papers (read their blog!)
A related experiment is Alan Sokal's submission of a non-sense Cultural Studies paper (but not a randomly-generated one).

Beyond Computer Science

• compassion towards people
• compassion towards animals
An interesting document on the subject is this MRMC report, which criticises animal experimentation in the medical sciences, including maternal deprivation studies.

Trivia

My PhD advisor was Zvi Galil. His advisor was John Hopcroft. My mathematical ancestry can be traced back to the 16th century thanks to the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

Contact