Research Interests
I’m interested in Programming Languages and Verification, Interactive Theorem Proving, Language Design, Compilers, Specifications, and Software Engineering.
Currently, I’m working on the Bedrock2 project. It includes a very simple C-like source language, a program logic for it, and a compiler to RISC-V machine code, as specified by riscv-coq. Another project of our group, Kami, developed a RISC-V processor and proved it correct against the same riscv-coq spec, which enabled us to prove an end-to-end theorem about the behavior of a whole software-hardware stack. The first milestone of this project is the IoT lightbulb, which we presented at PLDI’21 (see paper and video). Earlier, I also gave a talk about it at the RISC-V Summit 2019, and you can find the video recording here.
Trouble combining undefined behavior and nondeterminism? ➔ Try omnisemantics!
While working on Bedrock2, my colleague Andres Erbsen and me came up with a style of programming language semantics that we think works much better in the presence of undefined behavior and nondeterminism than using traditional smallstep or bigstep operational semantics would. A little later, our advisor Adam Chlipala chatted with Arthur Charguéraud and they found out that he had discovered the same style of semantics as well, but was using it for functional languages, while we were using it for imperative languages. Together, we wrote a paper about it, and you can find a preprint here, or if you prefer just a short introduction, you can also check out this blog post.
Past Projects
- I was visiting Dr. Toby Murray at the University of Melbourne for 10 weeks to work on information flow control proofs for C
- For a six months master thesis internship, I was working with Prof. Andrew Appel’s group at Princeton, improving the proof automation tactics of their Verified Software Toolchain, and using it to verify the AES encryption implementation of mbed TLS
- During my master’s at EPFL, I was working with Prof. Martin Odersky’s Scala lab on the Dependent Object Types project, a formalization of the core of Scala’s type system, writing proofs on paper and using the proof assistants Twelf and Coq
- For a class project at EPFL, I contributed to the function termination checker of Leon, a tool for verification and synthesis of Scala programs by Prof. Viktor Kuncak’s group
- While working at the Scala lab, I contributed to dotty, a new Scala compiler serving as a research platform to investigate new language concepts and compiler technologies for Scala
- For my bachelor thesis, I designed, explored and implemented a simple structurally typed language in PLT redex
Publications
| [5] |
Andres Erbsen, Samuel Gruetter, Joonwon Choi, Clark Wood, and Adam Chlipala.
Integration Verification Across Software and Hardware for a
Simple Embedded System.
PLDI'21, 2021. [ bib | DOI | pdf ] |
| [4] |
Qinxiang Cao, Lennart Beringer, Samuel Gruetter, Josiah Dodds, and Andrew W.
Appel.
VST-Floyd: A Separation Logic Tool to Verify
Correctness of C Programs.
Journal of Automated Reasoning, 61(1-4):367--422, June 2018. [ bib | DOI | pdf ] |
| [3] |
Samuel Gruetter and Toby Murray.
Short Paper: Towards Information Flow Reasoning about
Real-World C Code.
In Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Programming
Languages and Analysis for Security - PLAS '17, pages 43--48,
Dallas, Texas, USA, 2017. ACM Press. [ bib | DOI | pdf ] |
| [2] |
Samuel Gruetter, Daniel Graf, and Benjamin Schmid.
Watch them Fight! Creativity Task Tournaments of the Swiss
Olympiad in Informatics.
Olympiads in Informatics, 10(1):73--85, July 2016. [ bib | DOI | pdf ] |
| [1] |
Nada Amin, Samuel Gruetter, Martin Odersky, Tiark Rompf, and Sandro Stucki.
The Essence of Dependent Object Types.
A List of Successes That Can Change the World: Essays Dedicated
to Philip Wadler on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, pages 249--272, 2016. [ bib | DOI | pdf ] |
Preprints and Reports
| [10] |
Arthur Charguéraud, Adam Chlipala, Andres Erbsen, and Samuel Gruetter.
Omnisemantics: Smooth Handling of Nondeterminism.
September 2022. [ bib | pdf ] |
| [9] |
Thomas Bourgeat, Ian Clester, Andres Erbsen, Samuel Gruetter, Andrew Wright,
and Adam Chlipala.
A Multipurpose Formal RISC-V Specification.
2021. [ bib | arXiv | pdf ] |
| [8] |
Samuel Gruetter.
Counterexamples for Coq Conjectures.
CoqPL'19, January 2019. [ bib | pdf ] |
| [7] |
Samuel Gruetter and Toby C. Murray.
VST-Flow: Fine-grained low-level reasoning about real-world
C code.
Technical report, University of Melbourne, September 2017. [ bib | pdf ] |
| [6] |
Samuel Gruetter.
Improving the Coq proof automation tactics of the Verified
Software Toolchain, based on a case study on verifying a C
implementation of the AES encryption algorithm.
MSc thesis, EPFL/Princeton University, April 2017. [ bib | pdf ] |
| [5] |
Samuel Gruetter.
Connecting Scala to DOT.
MSc semester project, EPFL, June 2016. [ bib | pdf ] |
| [4] |
Samuel Gruetter.
Dependent Object Types With Existential Quantification Over
Objects.
Research report, EPFL, July 2015. [ bib | pdf ] |
| [3] |
Samuel Gruetter.
Improving Leon's Termination Checker.
Project report, EPFL, June 2015. [ bib | pdf ] |
| [2] |
Samuel Gruetter.
Machine-checked typesafety proofs.
MSc semester project, EPFL, June 2014. [ bib | pdf ] |
| [1] |
Samuel Gruetter.
Explorations of type systems.
BSc semester project, EPFL, June 2013. [ bib | pdf ] |
Education
- Since September 2017: Pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at MIT with Prof. Adam Chlipala’s Programming Languages and Verification Group
- April 2017: MSc in Computer Science from EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland
- July 2013: BSc in Computer Science from EPFL
Industry Experience
- Summer 2021: At Google Research, worked on the Silver Oak Project, using Bedrock2 to formally verify drivers for peripherals used in the OpenTitan root of trust, and connected software correctness proofs to hardware correctness proofs
- Summer 2019: Worked with Rustan Leino at Amazon’s Automated Reasoning Group on a prototype rewrite of Amazon’s S3 Encryption Client in Dafny, a verification-aware programming language. Wrote and proved specifications for software interacting with real-world systems such as Amazon’s S3 storage service
- Fall 2015: 6 months Software Engineering Internship at Netcetera AG, Berne, working in a scrum team, developing a Web Application with a Java/Oracle DB/Spring backend and an AngularJS/TypeScript frontend
- Summer 2012: Java Internship at Accenture in Bangalore (India), developed a web interface with JSF/Enterprise JavaBeans monitoring hundreds of servers and databases