Ph.D. Candidate
I am a doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Under my advisor, Prof. Todd Austin, I research computer architecture mechanisms that allow developers to dynamically analyze software to find errors and security vulnerabilities with little runtime overhead.
Dynamic software analysis is extremely slow, so I attempt to find ways to speed it up. My work on Testudo looks into ways of sampling dynamic dataflow tests such as taint analysis and bounds checks. This can be done entirely in software, or with hardware additions that allow further optimizations.
I am also interested in accelerating other types of dynamic analysis. Data race detection, for instance, is an extremely important tool for ensuring that parallel software is correctly written. With processors delving further into the multicore domain, such programs are becoming more common. We need faster and more robust ways of finding concurrency errors in these programs.
Besides performing research, I ran the reading group for Michigan's Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory (ACAL) from August 2009 through September 2010. I recommend that anyone interested in computer architecture at Michigan attend these meetings; I've lost count of the number of times a paper we have discussed at this reading group has helped me in my own work. Beyond that, it gives students the chance to stand in front of a room of their peers and present research (even if it is not their own).
I graduated in May 2006 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering. The IPENG office at Illinois helped me spend five months studying at Okayama University, and I hope every undergraduate jumps at the opportunity to have a similar experience if she gets the chance.