|
Past
The usual documentation alleges that Benjamin Lawrence Titzer
was born near Chicago in 1980; when pressed for recollection, his response
is usually "I don't recall."
Some wonder whether the ambiguity of the phrase is meant to hide unwillingness
to incriminate himself or a general loss of memory consistent with amnesia.
It has been well established, however, that he spent the childhood and adolescent years of
his life in Indiana.
The local catholic school did its best to indoctrinate him in his formative
grade school years, but he largely ignored them and fantasized about technology.
He escaped to Castle High School in 1994, where he vented
frustration through playing Quake, Skeet shooting, computer programming,
web design, and writing poetry. In 1998, he was delivered again.
He plagued Purdue University from 1998 to 2002 as an undergraduate
majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics. During that time he warmed
chairs as a PUCC lab assistant until he became involved in
undergraduate research with the
Secure Software Systems Lab.
Purdue tried to bribe him with a Bachelor of Science degree in May 2002.
It failed. He returned as a graduate student.
In Summer 2002, he worked as an intern at
Sun Microsystems Laboratories in
Mountain View, California, where he contributed to a project focusing on
scalability enhancements for Java. From August 2002 to May 2003, he was
a graduate student in Computer Science at Purdue, where he served as
a teaching assistant for the senior-level software engineering
course CS 406. In summer 2003, he again
returned as an intern to Sun Microsystems Laboratories,
where he worked on moving the Hotspot JVM into the Solaris kernel.
In Fall 2003, he transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles
with his advisor
Jens Palsberg. In June of
2004 he earned the degree Master of Science in Computer Science from
UCLA. During that time, he worked on simulation and analysis of sensor network
programs. In 2004 and 2005, he developed the Avrora
microcontroller and sensor network simulator, which has attracted significant research attention
and incorporated a number of contributions from the community.
From April 2006
to August 2006, he interned with
David Bacon at IBM T.J. Watson Research
Center in Hawthorne, NY. There he developed the ExoVM system, which employs
program analysis and persistence techniques to pre-deploy Java applications
in more resource-constrained environments.
In August 2007, he completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at UCLA under professor Jens Palsberg.
Present
Ben recently joined
Mario Wolczko's group at
Sun Microsystems Laboratories,
in Menlo Park, California. There, he is working with a number
of talented virtual machine engineers on a project to develop a new
research JVM.
Ben's research interests center primarily around programming languages and compilers,
with particular focus on on very small embedded systems. He is still developing
and maintaining the Virgil programming language and accompanying compiler system.
Outside of his professional life and interest in computation, Ben enjoys
reading literature, travelling, tennis, lounging at various local parks,
playing guitar, and writing.
You can see his curriculum vitae
here, and his research statement
here.
Future
At Sun Labs, he plans to continue pursuing
programming language and compiler research and developing software and tools
for systems-level programming employing advanced program analysis.
Once the world domination strategy is set irrevocably into motion,
he plans to travel more extensively and record music, enjoying the fruits
of the world. He is still trying to
make up for the crushing void left by all the classic literature
he didn't read in highschool because he was too busy programming or
playing Quake. "Stay in school, kids?" No, no, no. Get out while you can!
Research Contributions/Interests
- Virgil - Programming language designed for systems software
- ExoVM - A system for VM and application reduction using pre-initialization, closure, and persistence.
- Avrora - AVR Simulation and Analysis Framework
- Redpants - Open Source Operating System
- Redpants Development Archive - Source and binaries for kernel and utilities
- OVM - Interface Method Dispatch
- OVM - Interpreter Optimizations
- JaMit - Java Access Modifier Inference Tool
- InVis - Java Inheritance Visualization Tool
- TGen - Type Generation System
- Native Code Isolation - Security Improvements for Java
Publications and Documents
- Ben L. Titzer. Objects to Bits: Efficient Implementation of Object-Oriented Languages on Very Small Devices. PhD Dissertation. Los Angeles, CA. August 2007.
- Ben L. Titzer and Jens Palsberg. Vertical Object Layout and Compression for Fixed Heaps.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Compilers, Architecture, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES '07). Salzburg, Austria. October 2007.
- Ben L. Titzer, Joshua Auerbach, David F. Bacon, and Jens Palsberg. The ExoVM System for Automatic VM and Application Reduction. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI '07). San Diego, CA. June 2007.
- Ben L. Titzer. Virgil: Objects on the Head of a Pin.
In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on Object-Oriented Systems,
Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA '06). Portland, OR. October 2006.
- Olaf Landsiedel, Klaus Wehrle, Ben L. Titzer, and Jens Palsberg.
Enabling Detailed Modeling and Analysis of Sensor Networks. Praxis der Informationsverarbeitung und Kommunikation, 28(2):10-15. 2005.
- Ben L. Titzer and Jens Palsberg.
Nonintrusive Precision Instrumentation of Microcontroller Software.
In Proceedings of the ACM SIGBED Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES '05). Chicago, IL. June 2005.
- Ben L. Titzer, Daniel Lee, and Jens Palsberg. Avrora: Scalable Sensor Network Simulation with Precise Timing. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN '05). Los Angeles, CA. April 2005.
- Ben L. Titzer. Avrora: The AVR Simulation and Analysis Framework. Master's Thesis. Los Angeles, CA. June 2004.
- Grzegorz Czajkowski, Laurent Daynes, and Ben Titzer. A Multiuser Virtual Machine. USENIX 2003 Annual Technical Conference, San Antonio, TX. June 2003.
- Ben L. Titzer. Multiprocessing Support for Hobby OSes Explained. Tutorial, 2002.
Reading 2008
- The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Reading 2007
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
- Foundation by Isaac Asimov
- The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
- A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
Reading 2006
- Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
- Our Culture, What's Left of It by Theodore Dalrymple
- Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
- Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
- To A God Unknown by John Steinbeck
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Reading 2005
- The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
- We the Living by Ayn Rand
- The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Anthem by Ayn Rand
- Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Reading 2004
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
Reading 2003
- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
- The Pearl by John Steinbeck
- Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
- The Aeneid by Virgil
- The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
|
Other Interests
- Acoustic Guitar
- Blues/Slide Electric Guitar
- Classic Literature
- Creative Writing
- Pool and Billiards
- Cycling
- Hiking
- Celestial Mechanics
- Number Theory
|
Most Admired People
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
Alan Turing (1912-1954)
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
Jimmy Page (1944- )
John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)
Eric Clapton (1945- )
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Stephen Hawking (1942- )
|
Quote of the Day
"The mind is its own place, and in itself /
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n"
--John Milton, Paradise Lost
|
If there were no Computer Science, I would be:
a Spaceman
Copyright (c) 2002-2008 Ben L. Titzer
my_last_name [at] cs [dot] ucla [dot] edu
|
|
|