Michael Hicks

I am an associate professor in the Computer Science Department and UMIACS, and an affiliate associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, at the University of Maryland, College Park. My primary research interest is to develop and evaluate techniques to improve software reliability and security. With Bill Pugh and Jeff Foster I direct PLUM, the lab for Programming Languages research at the University of Maryland. You may find it interesting to read about how we organize our group.

During academic 2008 - 2009, I am on sabbatical in Cambridge, England. From September to November I was at Microsoft Research and for the remainder of my stay I am at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.

Office:	FS02
Phone:	+44 (0)1223 763 591

Here is my current vita and a list of my publications, organized by year and by category.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in August 2001, and I spent one year as a post-doctoral associate affiliated with the Information Assurance Institute of the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. 

How fast can you type? (My best so far is 97 wpm.)

Students

Graduated students:

Pavlos Papageorgiou	Software Engineer, Google, New York, since December 2008
Iulian Neamtiu	Asst. Prof, UC Riverside, since Fall 2008
Polyvios Pratikakis*	Post-doc, CNRS/VERIMAG, since Fall 2008
Nikhil Swamy	Researcher, Microsoft Research, Redmond, since Fall 2008
Jeff Meister* (undergrad)	Grad student, UCSD, since Fall 2008
Nick Petroni**	Research scientist, IDA/CCS since Spring 2008
Manuel Oriol (postdoc)	Senior Lecturer, University of York (UK), since Fall 2008

* co-advised with Jeff Foster

** co-advised with Bill Arbaugh

I am also working with Mike Furr and David An (advised by Jeff Foster), Justin McCann (advised by Neil Spring), and Suriya Subramanian (advised by Kathryn McKinley) on a couple of projects. In the past I have worked with James Rose and Jaime Spacco. Ted Smith, a high school student at Walt Whitman High, also did some great summer work with me.

Research

I am currently working on a number projects.

Ginseng - a practical system for dynamically updating running software written in C.

SELinks - a programming language that supports custom-defined security policies for web applications.

Path Projection - an approach to presenting the results of static analysis tools that accounts for the user's cognitive process. Path projection is a browser-based UI toolkit for presenting, navigating, and querying paths emitted as static analysis results.

Measurement-aware Data Transport - We are exploring ways in which passive and active measurement schemes can be integrated with transport protocols to reduce overhead and improve performance.

Here are a number of projects that are currently inactive:

LockSmith - a static analysis tool for proving the absence of race conditions in C programs, requiring few or no annotations.

CMod - A module system for legacy C programs.

Runtime Kernel Integrity Monitoring - a technique for automatically monitoring the integrity of kernel code/control-flow behavior in an effort to detect rootkits.

Cyclone - a dialect of C for more reliable and secure systems programming. A hallmark of Cyclone is type safety combined with a high degree of control over data layout and memory management.

RX - a programming language that supports proving the absence of illicit information flows in programs while allowing policies to evolve over time. We are targeting multi-tier web applications.

Transparent Proxies for Java. A static analysis for adding or checking proxy-based functionality in Java programs, e.g., to support asynchronous method invocation in which proxies store futures - the results of computations not yet completed.

FindLocks - a tool for proving the absence of race conditions in Java programs, which uses dynamic trace data to aid a sound static analysis.

MediaNet is a distribution network for streaming data using distributed, adaptive scheduling to provide Quality-of-Service.

Teaching

• CMSC 631 (Program Analysis and Understanding) Fall 2006 and Fall 2007
• CMSC 433 (Programming Language Technologies and Paradigms) Spring 2006, Fall 2003, Fall 2002
• CMSC 412 (Operating Systems) Spring 2007, Fall 2005, Fall 2004
• CMSC 838Z (Language-Based Security) Spring 2005
• CMSC 838Z (Tools and Techniques for Software Dependability) Spring 2004
• CMSC 838Y (Agile and Adaptive Programming Systems) Spring 2003

Professional Activities

I have served (or am serving) on the program committees for