Dawson Engler Explained

Education:	Arizona State University Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Awards:	Mark Weiser Award (2006) Grace Murray Hopper Award (2008)
Fields:	Computer science
Workplaces:	Stanford University
Thesis Title:	The exokernel operating system architecture
Thesis Url:	http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/exo/theses/engler/thesis.ps
Thesis Year:	1998
Doctoral Advisor:	Frans Kaashoek

Dawson R. Engler is an American computer scientist and an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University.

Career

After graduating from University of Arizona, Engler earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998 while working with Frans Kaashoek in the MIT CSAIL Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group. The focus of his graduate studies was the exokernel.^{[1] [2] [3]}

Engler is currently an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University. In 2002, he co-founded Coverity with several of his students to commercialize his group's work in static code analysis for bug-finding technology.^[4]

Awards and honors

Engler and his co-authors received the Best Paper award at USENIX's OSDI conferences in 2000, 2004, and 2008.^[5] With his students Cristian Cadar and Daniel Dunbar, he was jointly awarded the 2018 SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award for their paper at the 2008 conference.^[6]

Engler won the 2006 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award for his work in operating systems research.^[7] In 2008, he received the Grace Murray Hopper Award for "ground-breaking work on automated program checking and bug-finding".^[8]

Selected publications

• Cadar . C. . Dunbar . D. . Engler . D. . Klee: Unassisted and automatic generation of high-coverage tests for complex systems programs . Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2008 . December 8, 2008 . 209–224.
• Book: Engler . D. R. . Kaashoek . M. F. . O'Toole . J. . Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles - SOSP '95 . Exokernel . 1995 . 251–266 . 10.1145/224056.224076. 0897917154 . 221932539 .
• Book: Cadar . Cristian . Ganesh . Vijay . Pawlowski . Peter M. . Dill . David L. . Engler . Dawson R. . Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security . EXE: Automatically generating inputs of death . 2006 . 322–335 . 10.1145/1180405.1180445. 1595935185 . 209393318 .
• Engler . Dawson . Ashcraft . Ken . RacerX: effective, static detection of race conditions and deadlocks . ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review . December 2003 . 37 . 5 . 237–252 . 10.1145/1165389.945468.
• Engler . Dawson . Chen . David Yu . Hallem . Seth . Chou . Andy . Chelf . Benjamin . Bugs as deviant behavior: a general approach to inferring errors in systems code . ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review . December 2001 . 35 . 5 . 57–72 . 10.1145/502059.502041.

External links

• Dawson Engler on the Stanford University website

Notes and References

1. Web site: Dawson Engler . Stanford University . August 18, 2020.
2. Engler . Dawson R . The Exokernel Operating System Architecture . MIT . 1998 . PostScript.
3. Engler . D. R. . Kaashoek . M. F. . O'Toole . J. . Exokernel: an operating system architecture for application-level resource management . ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review . December 3, 1995 . 29 . 5 . 251–266 . 10.1145/224057.224076.
4. Bessey . Al . Block . Ken . Chelf . Ben . Chou . Andy . Fulton . Bryan . Hallem . Seth . Henri-Gros . Charles . Kamsky . Asya . McPeak . Scott . Engler . Dawson . A few billion lines of code later: using static analysis to find bugs in the real world . Communications of the ACM . February 2010 . 53 . 2 . 66–75 . 10.1145/1646353.1646374 . 2611544 .
5. Web site: USENIX Best Papers . . May 11, 2019.
6. Web site: Johansen . Håvard . The Hall of Fame Award 2018 . . August 18, 2020 . October 29, 2019.
7. Web site: The Mark Weiser Award . May 10, 2019.
8. Web site: Dawson Engler . Association for Computing Machinery.