If you’re a Malaysian/Singaporean or whoever speaks or understand Hokkien, the word Cibai will immediately catch your attention and you know what it meant.

If you dun understand the dialect, I’ll explain to you. ‘Cibai‘ is a Hokkien (one of the Chinese dialect) word which means vagina. However, it is not used as such a innocent word, it’s a foul language usually used for swearing. Check out the meaning at urban Dictionary.

Now, Microsoft have named one of their tool as Cibai. “Nice”, “wonderful”, and interesting name huh?

Initially, I thought that it was some kinda prank, but again, this looks totally real and you may visit the website here for more information.

This shows that the person whom have came up with this name and the person whom have approved the name most likely doesn’t speak Hokkien, otherwise I believe this wouldn’t be approved. It’s one of the worst name you could give to a product/research done by yourself, unless you really hated it so much.

I got this somewhere on the internet -> Official Explanation from the Microsoft Researcher who developed CIBAI, Francesco Logozzo: “This is an old project I made when I was at university. I do not maintain it anymore, and the name stands for “Class Invariants By Abstract Interpretation” (CIBAI) “.

From the Microsoft Research site, it’s stated below:

We introduce Cibai a generic static analyzer based on abstract interpretation for the modular analysis and verification of Java classes. We present the abstract semantics and the underlying abstract domain, a combination of an aliasing analysis and octagons.

We discuss some implementation issues, and we compare Cibai with similar tools, showing how Cibai achieves a higher level of automation and precision while having comparable performances.

So, in IT terms and IT world, the next time a person says you Cibai, seems like it isn’t that bad afterall?