EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Zafer Esen
dblp:144/3343
· DBLP profile ↗
7ranked-venue papers
3as first author
5since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-1522-6673ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 5 · 3 first-author · 4 since 2021Theory of computation · 5 · 2 first-author · 4 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | A program instrumentation framework for automatic verificationabstractAbstract In deductive verification and software model checking, dealing with certain specification language constructs can be problematic when the back-end solver is not sufficiently powerful or lacks the required theories. One way to deal with this is to transform, for verification purposes, the program to an equivalent one not using the problematic constructs, and to reason about this equivalent program instead. In this article, we propose program instrumentation as a unifying verification paradigm that subsumes various existing ad-hoc approaches, has a clear formal correctness criterion, can be applied automatically, and can transfer back witnesses and counterexamples. We illustrate our approach on the automated verification of programs that involve quantification and aggregation operations over arrays, such as the maximum value or sum of the elements in a given segment of the array, which are known to be difficult to reason about automatically. We implement our approach in the MonoCera tool, which is tailored to the verification of programs with aggregation, and evaluate it on example programs, including SV-COMP programs. Jesper Amilon, Zafer Esen, Dilian Gurov, Christian Lidström, Philipp Rümmer, Marten Voorberg |
Formal Methods Syst. Des. | 2 |
| 2026 | Sound and Complete Invariant-Based Heap EncodingsabstractVerification of programs operating on heap-allocated data structures, for instance lists or trees, poses significant challenges due to the potentially unbounded size of such data structures. We present time-indexed heap invariants , a novel invariant-based heap encoding leveraging uninterpreted predicates and prophecy variables to reduce verification of heap-manipulating programs to verification of programs over integers only. Our encoding of heap is general and agnostic to specific data structures. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first heap invariant-based method that achieves both soundness and completeness. We provide formal proofs establishing the correctness of our encodings. Through an experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that time-indexed heap invariants significantly extend the capability of existing verification tools, allowing automatic verification of programs with heap that were previously out of reach for state-of-the-art tools. Zafer Esen, Philipp Rümmer, Tjark Weber |
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. | 1 |
| 2025 | Arithmetizing Shape AnalysisabstractAbstract Memory safety is a fundamental correctness property of software. For programs that manipulate linked, heap-allocated data structures, ensuring memory safety requires analyzing their possible shapes. Despite significant advances in shape analysis, existing techniques rely on hand-crafted domains tailored to specific data structures, making them difficult to generalize and extend. This paper presents a novel approach that reduces memory-safety proofs to the verification of heap-less imperative programs, enabling the use of off-the-shelf software verification tools. We achieve this reduction through two complementary program instrumentation techniques: space invariants, which enable symbolic reasoning about unbounded heaps, and flow abstraction, which encodes global heap properties as local flow equations. The approach effectively verifies memory safety across a broad range of programs, including concurrent lists and trees that lie beyond the reach of existing shape analysis tools. Sebastian Wolff 0001, Ekanshdeep Gupta, Zafer Esen, Hossein Hojjat, Philipp Rümmer, Thomas Wies |
CAV (1) | 3 |
| 2023 | Automatic Program Instrumentation for Automatic VerificationabstractAbstract In deductive verification and software model checking, dealing with certain specification language constructs can be problematic when the back-end solver is not sufficiently powerful or lacks the required theories. One way to deal with this is to transform, for verification purposes, the program to an equivalent one not using the problematic constructs, and to reason about its correctness instead. In this paper, we propose instrumentation as a unifying verification paradigm that subsumes various existing ad-hoc approaches, has a clear formal correctness criterion, can be applied automatically, and can transfer back witnesses and counterexamples. We illustrate our approach on the automated verification of programs that involve quantification and aggregation operations over arrays, such as the maximum value or sum of the elements in a given segment of the array, which are known to be difficult to reason about automatically. We implement our approach in the MonoCera tool, which is tailored to the verification of programs with aggregation, and evaluate it on example programs, including SV-COMP programs. Jesper Amilon, Zafer Esen, Dilian Gurov, Christian Lidström, Philipp Rümmer |
CAV (3) | 2 |
| 2022 | Tricera: Verifying C Programs Using the Theory of Heaps
Zafer Esen, Philipp Rümmer |
FMCAD | 1 |
| 2020 | Reasoning in the Theory of Heap: Satisfiability and Interpolation
Zafer Esen, Philipp Rümmer |
LOPSTR | 1 |
| 2013 | Artificial Neural Networks Controller Algorithm Developed for a Brushless DC MotorabstractBrush less DC Motors are often preferred due to their high power/volume ratio in electrical vehicles with space constraint and need of high power and space technologies. So that, modeling, simulation and controlling of Brush less DC (BLDC) Motors should be developed for these applications. In this study, the modelling and simulation studies for a BLDC motor in MATLAB/Simulink and a controller design in the structure of ANN based control system with PID compensator are presented. Developed control algorithm is converted to C code which can be understood by standard compilers with Simulink/Target Language Compiler plugin and this code is compiled and embedded to DSPIC MCU. Simulation and test results are compared and good correlation is found between them. Ilhami Colak, Murat Sahin, Zafer Esen |
ICMLA (2) | 3 |