Professor Pedro Fonseca Receives Google Faculty Research Award

03-05-2019

Selected from more than one thousand proposals, Professor Pedro Fonseca has received a 2018 Google Faculty Research Award. Google Faculty Research Awards are one-year awards structured as unrestricted gifts to support the research of world-class faculty members at top universities around the world pursuing cutting-edge research incomputer science, engineering, and related fields.Google hopes the collaborative relationships built with world-class computer science faculty researchers will impact how future generations use technology. Fonseca’s proposal, “Principled approaches for effective concurrency testing of OS kernels,” was one of the projects to survive the highly competitive Google-wide selection process and receive funding this year. The Faculty Research Award gives both the winning faculty member and the graduate student the opportunity to work directly with Google researchers and engineers.

Fonseca’s project receiving support from the Google Faculty Research Award.

“Principled approaches for effective concurrency testing of OS kernels”
Kernels are highly concurrent and thus highly vulnerable to concurrency bugs. Although there has been significant work on finding schedules that trigger concurrency bugs, and data race detectors that can detect certain forms of concurrency bugs, the problem of finding concurrent input that triggers concurrency bugs has been largely unexplored and is typically addressed with ineffective, naive solutions (i.e., providing random input). In this proposal, we consider developing methodologies and building a dynamic testing tool that automatically finds interesting concurrent input to test modern kernels. 

Professor Fonseca joined Purdue in the fall of 2018. He completed his PhD in computer science and engineering at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken, Germany. Before joining Purdue, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Washington in Seattle. His research focuses on building systems that are both reliable and secure. He has developed techniques and methodologies that are particularly suited to address this problem in the context of core software which other software layers critically rely upon, such as: operating systems, hypervisors, and distributed systems. He approaches this research by gathering insights on emerging trends, building systematic testing tools, and designing and redesigning software systems. Fonseca works in three of Purdue’s Department of Computer Science Research areas; Distributed Systems, Information Security and Assurance, and Networking and Operating Systems.

 

Writer: Emily Kinsell, 765-494-0669, emily@purdue.edu, @emilykinsell