Research

I completed my PhD at the Dependable Systems Lab, under the supervision of George Candea.

My work focused on Elastic Program Transformations: flexible techniques to increase the reliability of software. This 30-minute talk gives an overview of Elastic Program Transformations and their applications.

Publications | CV | three-minute video overview of my research

Research Interests

My aim is to build tools that help developers create better software. My projects automatically transform programs to make them more secure, and help developers discover unexpected inputs that cause their programs to crash. I want my work to handle both the scale and the performance requirements of large programs, and I evaluate it on real-world software systems.

Projects

During my PhD, I built FUSS, a technique to test programs with randomly generated inputs, and quickly find those inputs that trigger bugs in the software. Key to its success is FUSS’s ability to obtain feedback from the program without unnecessarily slowing down the testing process.

I am the main author of ASAP. This project empowers developers to use the instrumentation tools they love — data race detectors, memory safety enforcement, tracing and logging tools — without suffering from high performance overhead. ASAP is free software.

Previously, I have worked on automatic bug finding. I have explored how information from static program analysis can improve dynamic symbolic execution. For example, I found that choosing the right program transformations at compile-time can make symbolic execution an order of magnitude faster, and so I developed the -Overify compiler flag that optimizes software for verification and bug finding.

Biography

I did my PhD at the Dependable Systems Lab at EPFL, researching tools for software developers. During my PhD, I spent one summer as an intern at Google, analyzing security vulnerabilities in Android apps. In 2011, I obtained a Master’s degree in Communication Systems from EPFL. My master thesis on measuring the performance of VPN tunnels was developed at Open Systems AG. During my studies, I was an intern at MadeinLocal.com and Bucher & Suter AG, and spent an exchange year at NTU in Singapore.