Malavika Samak

I am a program analysis engineer at Apple Inc. working towards mitigating security vulnerabilities in programs. Before this, I was a Postdoctoral Associate at CSAIL, MIT. I received my Ph.D. from IISc, Bangalore, and was supported by a Google India Ph.D. fellowship. My research interests are in programming languages and software engineering. More specifically:

static and dynamic program analysis

software testing and reliability

code search and replacement

program synthesis and verification

I am interested in designing techniques, tools, and workflows to improve developer productivity and software reliability. I have designed program analyses that enable developers to discover, reason, customize, and adapt code to build defect-free software systems. Specifically, I have worked on synthesizing targeted multithreaded tests for detecting concurrency bugs in software libraries (OOPSLA'14, PLDI'15, FSE'15, OOPSLA'16), improving the precision of dynamic analysis for bug detection (PPoPP'14), applying program synthesis for optimizing database queries (SOSP'17) and synthesizing adapters to enable software library replacement (POPL'20). I have also worked on efficient search techniques to identify replacement Java classes from large codebase collections (arXiv'21). Currently, I am working on mitigating vulnerabilities in C++ programs. More details can be found here .

Select Publications

• Synthesizing Replacement Classes.
  Malavika Samak, Deokhwan Kim, Martin Rinard.
  ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2020).
  

• Directed Synthesis of Failing Concurrent Executions.
  Malavika Samak, Omer Tripp, Murali Krishna Ramanathan.
  Annual Conference on Object-oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2016).
  

• Synthesizing Racy Tests.
  Malavika Samak, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Suresh Jagannathan.
  Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2015).