Benno Stein

Computer Scientist, PhD

Software Engineer at SkipLabs

dblp

github

twitter

About Me

I am a software engineer and computer scientist based in London, UK. I'm currently working on reactive and incremental systems at SkipLabs.

I earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2022, where I was advised by Professor Bor-Yuh Evan Chang as a member of the CUPLV group. Before that, I graduated from Williams College in 2015 with a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science.

Feel free to get in touch over email or twitter if you're looking for something here that seems to be missing -- this website is less frequently updated than it once was!

Research Interests

I am interested in building static analysis tools and formalisms that are able to handle the complexities of modern software development. My dissertation focused on incremental and demand-driven abstract interpretation.

I've worked in the past on a range of program analysis topics in both academia and industry, including static analysis of dynamic languages, refinement type systems, type inference, and goal-directed analysis.

Paper @ TOPLAS '24

January 2024

Our paper Interactive Abstract Interpretation with Demanded Summarization (with Manu Sridharan and Bor-Yuh Evan Chang) was accepted at TOPLAS.

paper

Started @ SkipLabs

September 2023

I am now working as a Software Engineer at SkipLabs, building infrastructure, tools, and languages for reactive and incremental systems.

Infer Workshop @ PLDI

Orlando, FL, June 2023

I gave a talk on incremental program analysis at the 2023 Infer Workshop, outlining the history of Infer's incremental infrastructure, recent improvements that I've made, and our plans for further extensions going forward.

recording slides

Seminar @ TU Munich

Munich, July 2022

I gave a talk (remotely) on my dissertation work on incremental and demand-driven abstract interpretation at the ConVeY Seminar at TU Munich.

Dissertation Defense

London, UK / Boulder, CO, March 2022

My thesis Demanded Abstract Interpretation formalizes incremental and demand-driven variants of some abstract interpretation problems, showing how we can improve responsiveness and interactivity without sacrificing precision or correctness guarantees.

dissertation slides

Started @ Meta

London, UK, February 2022

I've taken a job as a Software Engineer in the Continuous Verification Lab at Meta London. I'm excited to work on industrial applications of static analysis while also exploring cutting-edge research and working with a great group of smart people. You can see what we're working on in the open-source Infer repo.

Ralph J. Slutz Student Excellence Award

Boulder, Colorado, September 2021

I was honored to receive the award, which is given by the CU Boulder CS Department to "recognize students in computer science who have established a record of academic excellence and/or technical research and innovation."

Paper @ PLDI '21

Virtual, June 2021

Our paper Demanded Abstract Interpretation will be presented at the ACM/SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2021)

paper slides

Thesis Proposal

Boulder, Colorado, February 2021

I proposed a dissertation centered around my recent work on Interactive Abstract Interpretation, in which I lift arbitrary abstract interpreters to incremental and demand-driven equivalents that are provably sound, terminating, and from-scratch consistent with the underlying interpreter.

proposal slides

Paper @ OOPSLA '19

Athens, Greece, October 2019

We presented our paper Static Analysis with Demand-Driven Value Refinement at the ACM/SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications.

paper poster slides

Facebook Internship

London, UK, Fall 2019

I worked with Josh Berdine and the Infer team on Sledge: a separation logic-based symbolic executor for LLVM.

open-source

Paper @ ASE '18

Montpellier, France, September 2018

I presented our paper Safe Stream-Based Programming with Refinement Types at the 33rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering.

paper slides

Google Internship

Sunnyvale, CA, Summer 2018

I worked with Kevin Bierhoff and the Java language platform team to implement some improvements (type inference, access-path tracking, type annotation and bound support) for the Error Prone Java nullness analysis.

open-source

Student Volunteer @ POPL '18

Los Angeles, CA, January 2018

Attended and assisted with logistics at POPL and several co-located workshops.

Uber Internship

Palo Alto, CA, Summer 2017

I built a type analysis to statically detect multithreading bugs in functional-reactive Android applications, working under Manu Sridharan in the static analysis group.

open-source

Oregon Programming Languages Summer School

Eugene, OR, June 2016

Attended OPLSS 2016. I saw a wide range of talks from invited lecturers and other students, gave a talk on my own research, and got to know a ton of other PL researchers.

PLDI Student Research Competition

Santa Barbara, CA, June 2016

Attended PLDI and won 2nd place in the SRC for my presentation on Goal-Directed Backwards Static Analysis for JavaScript.

poster abstract

DARPA MUSE Demo Hackathon

Washington D.C., February 2016

Assisted the CUPLV MUSE team with their hackathon by building a backwards, goal-directed Android analysis, looking for misuses of common Android encryption libraries.

PLMW @ POPL

St. Petersburg, FL, January 2016

Attended POPL '16 and the co-located Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop, supported by a research community development grant from CU.

Publications [click to expand]

Interactive Abstract Interpretation with Demanded Summarization

TOPLAS '24

Benno Stein, Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, Manu Sridharan.
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS '24)

pdf

ACM DL

Demanded Abstract Interpretation

PLDI '21

Benno Stein, Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, Manu Sridharan.
ACM/SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI '21)

pdf

extended

slides

Static Analysis with Demand-Driven Value Refinement

OOPSLA '19

Benno Stein, Benjamin Barslev Nielsen, Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, Anders MÃ¸ller.
ACM/SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA '19)
(Slides courtesy of Benjamin Barslev Nielsen)

pdf

slides

poster

Safe Stream-Based Programming with Refinement Types

ASE '18

Benno Stein, Lazaro Clapp, Manu Sridharan, Bor-Yuh Evan Chang.
33rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE '18)

pdf

slides