Jeff Foster Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science University of Maryland, College Park Email: jfoster at cs.umd.edu Office: 4129 A.V. Williams Phone: (301) 405-2751 (Please read this before e-mailing me)

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department and UMIACS at the University of Maryland, College Park. I am a member of the programming languages group at Maryland.

The goal of my research is to develop practical tools and techniques to improve software quality. I am interested in programming languages, software engineering, advanced static type systems, scalable constraint-based analysis, and building tools that implement my ideas. In the past I worked on the BANE Project and was a member of the Open Source Quality Project.

As part of my research I have developed cqual, a tool for adding type qualifiers to C programs.

In Fall 2008, I will be teaching CMSC 330, Organization of Programming Languages. I will be teaching CMSC 631 in Spring 2009.

Recent Publications and Drafts

• Static Type Inference for Ruby. Draft. To appear in OOPS track, SAC 2009. Longer version.
• Locksmith: Practical Static Race Detection for C. Draft.
• Serializing C intermediate representations for efficient and portable parsing. Draft.
• Adapting Scrum to Managing a Research Group. Unpublished.
• Directing JavaScript with Arrows. ICFP 2008 Poster. (tech rpt)
• Path Projection for User-Centered Static Analysis Tools. To appear in PASTE 2008. (tech rept)
• Formalizing Soundness of Contextual Effects. TPHOLs 2008.
• Modular Information Hiding and Type-Safe Linking for C - TSE May/June 2008 (preprint) (tech rpt)
• Contextual Effects for Version-Consistent Dynamic Software Updating and Safe Concurrent Programming - POPL 2008 (tech rpt)
• Inferring Aliasing and Encapsulation Properties for Java - OOPSLA 2007
• Type Qualifier Inference for Java - OOPSLA 2007
• Improving Software Quality with Static Analysis - PASTE 2007
• Checking Type Safety of Foreign Function Calls - TOPLAS Jul 2008 (preprint)
• Modular Information Hiding and Type-Safe Linking for C - TLDI 2007 (tech rpt)
• Rule-Based Static Analysis of Network Protocol Implementations - I&C special issue, Feb-Apr 2008 (preprint)
• Flow-Insensitive Type Qualifiers - TOPLAS, Nov 2006 (preprint)
• Existential Label Flow Inference via CFL Reachability - SAS 2006 (tech rpt)
• Rule-Based Static Analysis of Network Protocol Implementations - USENIX Security 2006
• Lock Inference for Atomic Sections - TRANSACT 2006
• Locksmith: Context-Sensitive Correlation Analysis for Race Detection - PLDI 2006 (tech rpt)
• Polymorphic Type Inference for the JNI - ESOP 2006 (tech rpt)
• Checking Type Safety of Foreign Function Calls - PLDI 2005 (tech rpt)
  You can also download Saffire, our implementation.

Students

• Mike Furr
• Martin Ma
• Saurabh Srivastava
• Khoo Yit Phang
• Chris Hayden
• David An

Graduated/Graduating Students

• Polyvios Pratikakis - Postdoc, CNRS/VERIMAG, starting Fall 2008.
• Jeff Meister - Now a graduate student at UCSD

Professional Activities

• PLDI 2009 External Review Committee
• TLDI 2009 Program Committee
• Summer School on Logic and Theorem Proving in Programming Languages, July 2008, Steering Committee
• IWACO 2008 Program Committee
• MSR India Summer School on Programming Languages, Analysis and Verification, June 2008, Lecturer
• CCS 2008 Program Committee
• ECOOP 2008 Program Committee
• Summer School on Language-Based Techniques for Integrating with the External World, July 2007, Co-organizer
• PLAS 2007 Program Committee
• POPL 2007, POPL 2008, POPL 2009 Treasurer
• Summer School on Language-Based Techniques for Concurrent and Distributed Software, July 2006 Co-organizer
• PLDI 2006 Tutorials Chair
• Summer School on Fault Tolerance and Reliable Computing Lecturer, July 2005
• PLDI 2004 Program Committee
• Summer School on Software Security Lecturer, June 2004

Software

• Arrowlets - Directing JavaScript with arrows
• Path Projection - Visualizing program paths for user-centered static analysis
• Uno - Inferring aliasing and encapsulation for Java
• JQual - Type qualifier inference for Java
• CMod - Enforcing modular programming in C
• Pistachio - A rule-based static analysis tool for network protocol implementations
• Locksmith - A static analysis tool for detecting data races in C programs
• Saffire - Static Analysis of Foreign Function Interfaces
• CQual - A tool for adding type qualifiers to C.
• Carillon - A type-qualifier based system for finding Y2K bugs in C programs.
• BANE - The Berkeley Analysis Engine, a toolkit for building constraint-based analyses. Also see Banshee, the successor to Bane.

Other

I am always looking for new students interested in working with me on research projects in programming languages as applied to software engineering problems. If you are interested in finding out more about recent work in programming languages, please get in touch!