I have been an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Illinois since August 1999. I joined Illinois after several years as a Research Scientist in the parallelizing compiler group at Rice University.  My broad research interests lie in using compilers (more generally, program analysis and transformation techniques) as tools for improving the performance, programmability, and security of modern computer systems.  My  research emphasizes the development of novel systems, compilation techniques, and (where necessary) language features to address these problems.  My current research includes security and reliability techniques for commodity systems, and languages and compilers for making parallel programming far easier than it is today.

Research

Our major research projects and their primary goals are as follows (see Publications for a full list of papers):

Secure Virtual Architecture: A compiler-based virtual machine for commodity operating systems: think Xen meets JVM (but for C, not Java). Combines and extends two previous technologies developed in our group -- SAFECode and LLVM -- to provide a safe execution environment for a complete commodity operating system.

SAFECode: Static Analysis For safe Execution of Code: To enable program safety without runtime checks and garbage collection, through 100% or near-100% static enforcement of program safety properties.  SAFECode defines a code representation with minimal semantic restrictions designed to enable static enforcement of safety, using aggressive compiler techniques developed in this project.

The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure: A novel virtual instruction set and compiler framework that enables lifelong analysis and transformation of programs in arbitrary programming langauges.   It also serves as a general compiler infrastructure for all of the research projects in our group.

Older Projects

The Adaptive Distributed Applications Project: To provide a programming model, language, compiler, and runtime environment for adaptive distributed applications.
This project is a component of the POEMS/MASC project on Model-Based Adaptive Software Control.

Awards

Audience Choice Paper Award, ACM 2007 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2007).

Best Paper Award, ACM SIGPLAN 2005 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2005).

C. W. Gear Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Computer Science Department, University of Illinois (2002)

NSF CAREER Award (2001)

Best Paper Award, Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2001)

IBM Graduate Fellowship (1989-90, 1990-91, 1991-92)