It's wonderful to be writing again at Decentralized Thoughts! This time focusing on how we can tie together the messy reality of real-world distributed system to the elegant formal models we often use instead for reasoning about correctness.
It's smart casual verification (like the dress code) instead of causal verification but still it's great to see our recent NSDI paper featured in the @MSFTResearch Focus.
In this issue: New research on compound AI systems and causal verification of the Confidential Consortium Framework; release of Phi-4-reasoning; enriching tabular data with semantic structure, and more: msft.it/6012SVNCj
A quick history lesson in the sunshine before #NSDI25. Exciting to speaking about our paper on “smart casual verification” with #TLAplus and how we applied it to find and fix subtle bugs in our distributed system the Confidential Consortium Framework.
A big thanks to @muratdemirbas for covering our upcoming NSDI paper on his blog. The paper documents our adventures with smart casual verification, combining formal specification & model checking with validation of real execution traces from the Confidential Consortium Framework
