DVClub Toronto - January 27, 2026 - Presenter Moshe Varde (Rice University)

DVClub is 20 years young (2005 - 2025)!

We will be handing out a free 20th Anniversary DVClub shirt for those in attendance!

Thank you to all who have participated and contributed over the years and continue to do so to this day!

Please join us on Tuesday, January 27, 2026, at the Sheraton Parkway Toronto North Hotel & Suites for a catered lunch and networking. Moshe Varde from Rice University will be our guest speaker.

• 11:30am — Doors Open / Networking
• 12:00pm — Lunch / Presentation by Moshe Varde
• 1:30pm — Networking

Presentation

"Program Verification: a 75+-Year History"

The year 2019 saw the 70th anniversary to Alan Turing's 1949 paper, "Checking a Large Routine" and the 50th anniversary of Tony Hoare's paper, "An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming". In the latter paper, Hoare stated: "When the correctness of a program, its compiler, and the hardware of the computer have all been established with mathematical certainty, it will be possible to place great reliance on the results of the program, and predict their properties with a confidence limited only by the reliability of the electronics."

In this talk, I will review the history of this vision, describing the obstacles, the controversies, and progress milestones. I will conclude with the description of both impressive progress and dramatic failures exhibited over the past few years.

The talk is accessible to general CS audience.

Moshe Y. Vardi is a University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. His research focuses on the interface of mathematical logic and computation -- including database theory, hardware/software design and verification, multi-agent systems, and constraint satisfaction. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Knuth Prize, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, and the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award. He is the author and co-author of over 800 papers, as well as two books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow as well as fellow of several societies, and a member of several academies, including the US National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science, and the Royal Society of London. He holds ten honorary titles.

He is a Senior Editor of the Communications of the ACM, the premier publication in computing.

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