DANSAS 2011 trip summary

Dermot Cochran and I attended DANSAS 2011 last week at SDU in Odense.

There was a healthy turnout of DK static analysis folks, particularly from Aarhus. I think that ITU was somewhat underrepresented though (hint hint).

The talks ranged in topic considerably and mainly provided a way for people to get to know what others were interested in lately, what new topics were popping up in the area, etc.

Zhendong Su from UC Davis gave an invited talk about dynamic and static program analysis for secure web applications. It was fairly pragmatic and straight-forward, but shows how focusing on a new problem with old techniques can really pay off.

Kevin Millikin, one of the authors of the V8 JavaScript compiler at Google (and an Aarhus PhD graduate from Olivier) gave the final talk about Crankshaft, their new compiler that does some static analysis of JavaScript. Again, this is all about doing great engineering and applying compiler and static analysis techniques that are 10-20 years old to modern problems and making a huge impact.

All in all I enjoyed this year's (and last year's) DANSAS and plan on going back to continue to make connections, see what people are up to, and help the community thrive.