
Xavier Rival
Research Director at INRIA Paris (Directeur de Recherche, DR 1)
Head of the ANTIQUE (ANalyste staTIQUE) Project-Team
(formerly Abstraction Project-Team)Recent and upcoming events
- On Correctness of Automatic Differentiation for Non-Differentiable Functions, NeurIPS 2020.
- Towards verified stochastic variational inference for probabilistic programs, ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2020), 2020.
- POPL 2020, New Orleans, USA 2020 (Program Committee)
- Introduction to static analysis book published at MIT Press!
- Semantic-Directed Clumping of Disjunctive Abstract States, ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2017), 2017 (VM).
- SAS 2016, Edinburgh, September 2016 (PC Chair)
- APLAS 2015, Pohang, South Korea, December 2015 (Program Committee)
- SAS 2014, Münich, Germany, September 2014 (Program Committee)
- VMCAI 2014, San Diego, USA, January 2014 (Program Committe Co-Chair)
- POPL 2014, San Diego, USA, January 2014 (Program Committee)
Research interests
I am working on static analysis for the verification of semantic properties of programs. My main focus is on abstract interpretation and more specifically on symbolic abstractions:
- Static Analysis of embedded, safety critical software
the Astrée project: static analysis, for proving the absence of runtime errors in safety critical embedded software.
Commercial support by AbsInt (see here for more info). - Shape analysis
- Certified Compilation
the Lcertify translation validator - Abstract Interpretation
- Slicing, dependence semantics
- Verification of Spreadsheet Applications
- Static Analysis of JavaScript Software
Software

- MemCAD static analyzer, as part of the MemCAD ERC Project.
- Astrée static analyzer.
- LCertify translation validator library.
Projects
- VeriAMOS ANR Project.
- MemCAD ERC Project (ERC Starting Grant).
- MBAT.
- Astrée.
- AstréeA.
- ANR VerAsCo.
- ANR AnaStaSec.
Current PhD students
- Josselin Giet, PhD Student at INRIA Paris, co-supervised with Gilles Muller
- Olivier Nicole, PhD Student at CEA and ENS Paris, co-supervised with Matthieu Lemerre.
- Ignacio Tiraboschi, PhD Student at INRIA Paris, co-supervised with Tamara Rezk
Past PhD students
- Tie Cheng, PhD at ENS Paris, graduated in September 2015. Founder and CEO of MatrixLead.
- Antoine Toubhans
- Arlen Cox, PhD at University of Colorado at Boulder and ENS Paris, co-advised with Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, graduated in November 2014. Researcher in Formal Methods.
- Huisong Li, PhD at ENS Paris, graduated in March 2018. Developer at TrustInSoft.
- Jiangchao Liu, PhD at ENS Paris, graduated in February 2018. Assistant Professor at NUDT.
- Hugo Illous, PhD Student at CEA and ENS Paris, co-supervised with Matthieu Lemerre.
Teaching
- I teach a part of the Semantics and application to verification Course, in the first year of the Computer Science Curriculum at ENS of Paris.
- I teach a part of the Abstract Interpretation course, at the Master Parisien de Recherche en Informatique (MPRI) Master.
- I teach a part of the Protocol Safety and Verification, at the Advanced Computer Network Master
- I teach a part of the Program Verification, Experimental Course in the third year of the École Polytechnique
- I teach the lecture on "Programmation Avancée" (Advanced Programming) in the second year of the École Polytechnique
Address and contact information
DI - Ecole Normale Supérieure45, rue d'Ulm
75230 Paris Cedex 05 - France
E-mail: rival A T di.ens.fr
Bureau: 2nd étage, "escalier de la direction", see the map
Phone: +33 1 44 32 21 50
Fax: +33 1 44 32 20 80