New Faculty

abhi shelat PhD, MIT, 2005 Joined UVa in Fall 2007	helat's research focuses on the modern study of cryptography. He investigates techniques for facilitating interactions between distrustful entities (e.g., automated tellers, wireless networks, internet banking, satellite radio/TV, etc). He emphasizes rigorous methods in combination with precise yet practical definitions and assumptions. Recent works considers topics such as exploiting imperfect reference strings, efficient access to untrusted shared memory, adaptive oblivious transfer, obfuscation, non-interactive and fair zero-knowledge proofs, collusion-free protocols, digital fingerprinting, and data compression.
Mark Sherriff PhD, North Carolina State University, 2007 Joined UVa in Fall 2007	herriff's research interests are in empirical software engineering and computer science education. His recent work has focused on using singular value decomposition with software development artifacts to highlight relationships within software systems. These relationships are based upon empirical records of system development and maintenance and can describe the evolution of the software system. When these relationships are coupled with verification and validation techniques such as static analysis or regression testing, maintenance and testing efforts can be directed based upon historical evidence of where previous faults have occurred. He also developed the Defect Estimation with Verification and Validation (V&V) Certificates on Programming (DevCOP) system for creating a persistent record of V&V practices as certificates, which can then be referenced later during the development and maintenance of the system.

2006

Kamin Whitehouse PhD, Berkeley, 2006 Joined UVa in Fall 2006	amin Whitehouse's reseach takes a holistic view of wireless sensor networks, exploring aspects of networking, hardware, and programming abstractions as required for real-world deployments. He produced a system to localize sensor nodes in multiple different environments, a key part of which is a new technique for non-parametric modeling and characterization of the physical environments and range sensors. Another of his current projects focuses on providing a traditional environment for the development and debugging of wireless, embedded systems without sacrificing bandwidth or memory at run time.
Jason Lawrence PhD, Princeton, 2006 Joined UVa in Fall 2006	ason Lawrence's reseach explores techniques for integrating empirical data into the computer graphics pipeline. The goal of his work is to enable artists, designers and hobbyists to easily acquire and incorporate measurements of complex real-world phenomena into synthetic imagery. He addresses the efficient acquisition, representation, storage and retrieval of high-dimensional datasets commonly encountered in graphics. He is investigating several new representations for surface reflectance functions derived from measured data, as well as generative probabilistic models for representing a broader class of light transport functions.
Westley Weimer PhD, Berkeley, 2005 Joined UVa in Jan 2006	es Weimer's research tries to advance software quality and reliability by combining static and dynamic programming language approaches. Wes is particularly concerned with automatic or minimally-guided techniques that can scale and be applied easily to large programs. "Merely" finding bugs is insufficient and it is also important to ensure that we are finding the right bugs and that we are helping programmers to fix them. Wes's Ph.D. thesis describes a dataflow analysis and fault model for finding a certain class of programming mistakes, a specification mining algorithm for automatically inferring important program properties, and a new language feature to make it easier to write bug-free code. Wes is also interested in applying work in systems and machine learning to programming languages research.

2005

Sudhanva Gurumurthi PhD, Penn State University, 2005 Joined UVa in Fall 2005	udhanva Gurumurthi's research focusses on designing high-performance computer architectures in the presence of fundamental technological constraints like power and reliability. Sudhanva's thesis research has focussed on the design of enterprise storage systems, such as those used in database and web servers, which can meet the dual goals of high performance and low energy consumption. He is interested in working on temperature-aware design of storage systems, which is rapidly becoming a critical problem in both enterprise-class systems and also mobile devices like laptops, PDAs and portable music devices. In addition, Sudhanva is also interested in working on how to design high-performance microprocessors in the presence of technological constraints such as power, soft-errors, and lifetime reliability, which are becoming dominant issues in computer architecture.
Kim Hazelwood PhD, Harvard University, 2004 Joined UVa in Fall 2005	im Hazelwood's research spans the interface of optimizing compilers and computer architecture. Her work focuses on the efficient implementation and execution of dynamic binary modification systems, including DynamoRIO and Pin. Dynamic binary modifiers are software systems that observe and transform (translate or optimize) every application instruction immediately prior to executing the instruction. They have been used to provide software compatibility for new hardware, and performance improvements for existing hardware. Kim is also interested in combined hardware and software techniques for improving the power, reliability, and security of modern systems.
Nina Mishra Phd, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1997 Joined UVa in Fall 2005	ina's research interests are in the design and analysis of algorithms for unearthing patterns in massively large, dynamic datasets. Clustering algorithms are of significant interest including clustering data streams, sublinear clustering, the design of new clustering objectives, identifying cluster descriptions and graph clustering. On the other hand, because so much data now contains private information, my efforts are also targeted towards algorithms that can strike a fine balance between simultaneously enabling the discovery of large-scale statistical patterns while disabling the recovery of private information. Several kinds of privacy-preserving techniques are of interest including input pertubation, auditing algorithms and secure computation.

2004

Aaron Bloomfield PhD, U. Pennsylvania, 2003 Joined UVa in September 2004	aron Bloomfield's research in computer graphics focuses on haptics: using the sense of touch to provide feedback to a virtual reality user. For example, by placing small, vibrating motors (aka 'tactors') on the skin's surface, the user can 'feel' the virtual world as they move through it - the tactors activate when the user collides with an object in the virtual environment. He is also interested in computer science education, specifically the undergraduate experience.
Mary Lou Soffa PhD, Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1977 Joined UVa in Fall 2004	Department Chair and Owen. R. Cheatham Professor ary Lou Soffa received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, given by the White House. She was elected an ACM Fellow, and serves on the Board of the Computing Research Association (CRA) and CRA-W. She has served on the Executive Committees of both SIGSOFT and SIGPLAN as well as conference chair, program chair or program committee member for numerous conferences. In addition, she has been active for many years on improving the participation of women in computer science. Mary Lou Soffa's research interests include optimizing and parallelizing compilers, program analysis, and software tools for debugging and testing programs.

2002-2003

Greg Humphreys PhD, Stanford, 2002 Joined UVa in September 2002	reg Humphreys's research attempts to bring scalability to the world of commodity graphics hardware. While consumer-level graphics accelerators have been outpacing Moore's law for several years now, that technology tends not to scale; that is, users cannot pay more money for higher performance. Current graphics hardware can consume data much faster than the host CPU can generate it, so a scalable solution is crucial to interactively visualize the massive datasets produced by scientific simulation and industrial CAD modellers. The system described in Greg's Ph.D. thesis for enabling flexible, scalable graphics on clusters of workstations is currently in production use in hundreds of academic, research, and industrial labs around the world. Greg is also interested in finding ways to exploit programmable graphics hardware to solve non-graphics problems.
Malathi Veeraraghavan PhD, Duke, 1988 Joined UVa in Feb 2003	alathi Veeraraghavan's research is aimed at advancing our understanding of data networking principles, understanding the impact of technological assumptions on these principles, and finally applying these principles to build next-generation networks capable of supporting new and challenging applications. For example, circuit switching has been "written off" in many classical text books as being unsuitable for computer data. Her team has demonstrated that with a technological advance, i.e., hardware implementation of signaling protocols, we can revisit the question of using circuit switching in data networks. Interesting call scheduling problems have been formulated from this work. Besides computer data transfers, these high-speed circuit-switched networks offer low-delay end-to-end connections. This means applications such as high-quality video telephony with multiple cameras and microphones can be realized. Besides high-speed networks, she also works on wireless and mobile networks and teaches a class on mobility management and wireless MAC protocols.