Swarthmore College Department of Computer Science

Carolyn Anderson wins FINALIST for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards 2014

carolyn picture

Carolyn Anderson '14 has been selected as a Finalist in the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award 2014.

Carolyn worked with Professor Nate Foster at Cornell on NetKAT, a network programming language in the Frenetic project. NetKAT is both a programming language for software-defined networks and a reasoning system based on Kleene Algebra with Tests. She proved that the equational theory of the language was sound with respect to its denotational semantics, and formalized the proofs in the Coq proof assistant. She also developed tests for reachability properties of the language like waypointing, and proved them equivalent to more intuitive denotational semantic definitions.

Carolyn presented this work in a paper entitled NetKAT: Semantic Foundations for Networks at POPL (Principles of Programming Languages) 2014 in San Diego, CA.