Section: Application Domains

Static analysis of data science software

Nowadays, thanks to advances in machine learning and the availability of vast amounts of data, computer software plays an increasingly important role in assisting or even autonomously performing tasks in our daily lives. As data science software becomes more and more widespread, we become increasingly vulnerable to programming errors. In particular, programming errors that do not cause failures can have serious consequences since code that produces an erroneous but plausible result gives no indication that something went wrong. This issue becomes particularly worrying knowing that machine learning software, thanks to its ability to efficiently approximate or simulate more complex systems, is slowly creeping into mission critical scenarios. However, programming errors are not the only concern. Another important issue is the vulnerability of machine learning models to adversarial examples, that is, small input perturbations that cause the model to misbehave in unpredictable ways. More generally, a critical issue is the notorious difficulty to interpret and explain machine learning software. Finally, as we are witnessing widespread adoption of software with far-reaching societal impact — i.e., to automate decision-making in fields such as social welfare, criminal justice, and even health care — a number of recent cases have evidenced the importance of ensuring software fairness as well as data privacy. Going forward, data science software will be subject to more and more legal regulations (e.g., the European General Data Protection Regulation adopted in 2016) as well as administrative audits. It is thus paramount to develop method and tools that can keep up with these developments and enhance our understanding of data science software and ensure it behaves correctly and reliably. In particular, we are interesting in developing new static analyses specifically tailored to the idiosyncrasies of data science software. This makes it a new and exciting area for static analysis, offering a wide variety of challenging problems with huge potential impact on various interdisciplinary application domains [13].