Invariants play a key role in verifying properties of imperative programs. Inductive reasoning is essential to verifying properties of recursive programs. Relationship between derivation of loop invariants and speculation of lemmas in inductive reasoning is explored. Abstraction is an effective heuristic for approximating program behavior in order to derive invariants. Interaction among developing abstractions, inductive reasoning, and generating invariants is investigated.

Bio: Deepak Kapur is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. From 1998 until 2006, he served as the chair of the computer science department there. He has conducted research in areas of automated deduction, induction theorem proving, term rewriting, unification theory, formal methods, algebraic and geometric reasoning and their applications. His group built one of the first rewrite-based theorem provers, called Rewrite Rule Laboratory. He served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Automated Reasoning from 1993-2007. He is on the editorial board of Journal of Symbolic Computation and other journals. Last year he received the Herbrand Award for distinguished contributions to automated reasoning.