The Computational Logic, Implementation, and Parallelism (CLIP) Group at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) is strongly committed to developing solutions which at the same time constitute quality research with a strong theoretical foundation and result in clearly applicable technology. The group has a long and active research history in program analysis, implementation of sequential and parallel systems, visualization, and program development environments (including static/dynamic debugging and user interfaces). A number of popular products in (Constraint) Logic Programming include the results of these research efforts.

The group has been involved in more than 25 current and past European research projects, working groups, thematic networks, and other international and domestic projects, over the past 12 years (among the past ones, we may cite, the ESPRIT projects AMOS, DiSCiPl, RadioWeb, Vocal, ACCLAIM, PRINCE, and ParForCe, and HCM Abile program, and COMPULOG II/III Networks of Excellence). UPM has also collaborated with a large number of companies in different projects (transferring technology to industry). Additionally, UPM's Ciao Prolog System, as well as some related tools, are being used by industries in the development of several products including WWW interfaces, B2B systems, and agent systems.

Fields of expertise

The CLIP Group at UPM has a long and active research history in the field of Advanced Programming Languages and Techniques. Research results in the theory and practice of program analysis, debugging and verification, transformation and optimization, parallelizing compilers, development environments, system implementation, and visualization have been published in a large number of international journals and conferences. These results have been applied to the design of widely used and actively maintained products, including CiaoPP, a program analysis and verification system, integrating abstraction carrying code, which supports multiple paradigms of programming (including constraint, logic, functional and object-oriented programming).

UPM will contribute expertise in the area of PCC, and, in particular, automatic generation and checking of certificates referring to complex properties of programs, such as upper and lower bounds on resource usage, i.e., inferring upper and lower bounds on data sizes, memory usage, and compute time. The main technique UPM will use is abstract interpretation, which lies somewhat in between the type-based and the logic-based approaches, in the sense that it is fully automatic, but allows more general properties than those handled by traditional type systems.

UPM has defined and implemented several analysis frameworks for (constraint) logic languages, with applications ranging from automatic detection of parallelism to performance improvement through better compilation. The information obtained from such an analysis has also been used to discover inconsistencies with respect to program assertions to drive static/dynamic debugging tools.

Involvement in related initiatives

The UPM team is currently coordinating the EU IST FET Programme Project ASAP "Advanced Specialization and Analysis for Pervasive Systems"; is involved in EU IST Programme Project IST-2004-511618 GridCoord "ERA Pilot on a co-ordinated Europe-wide initiative in Grid Research"; is a node of CologNet "The EU Network of Excellence in Computational Logic" (being also coordinator of its Implementation Technologies area); is a member of AgentLink "The Agent-Based Computing Network."

At a national level, the UPM team also leads the project CUBICO "Optimized Compilation Techniques for Pervasive Computation."

Contacts

Germán Puebla and Manuel Hermenegildo