2011 Award Honors University of Wisconsin Work that Underlies GrammaTech’s CodeSurfer®
Thomas Reps, Susan Horwitz, Mooly Sagiv, and Genevieve Rosay have been selected to receive an ACM SIGSOFT 2011 Retrospective Impact Paper Award for their 1994 publication “Speeding Up Slicing”. The paper reported on research performed at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) as part of the Wisconsin Program Slicing-Tool Project. Prototype software developed in that project was subsequently transitioned to GrammaTech and commercialized as CodeSurfer.
Reps is President and Co-founder of GrammaTech, Inc., as well as Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin. Horwitz is Consultant to GrammaTech, as well as Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin. Rosay was a Research Programmer at the University of Wisconsin until 1999 when she joined GrammaTech’s research staff; she retired in 2005.
The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (ACM SIGSOFT) recognizes papers that have been particularly influential in software engineering research and are judged by their influence since the time of publication. The algorithm described in the paper supports precise interprocedural program slicing in linear time at the cost of a cubic-time pre-computation of procedure summary information. This algorithm underlies GrammaTech’s CodeSurfer®, a sophisticated code browser used by organizations that manually review software for critical applications. CodeSurfer for C and C++ was first released in 1999, and has undergone 26 releases since then. CodeSufer/x86 provides similar functionality for stripped binary executables written in Intel x86 machine code. CodeSurfer is the underlying substrate supporting CodeSonar®, GrammaTech’s bug and security vulnerability finding tool.
In 2010, Dr. Reps also received the ACM SIGSOFT Retrospective Impact Paper Award for his 1984 paper, “The Synthesizer Generator”, co-authored with Dr. Tim Teitelbaum, Chairman and CEO of GrammaTech. In making the 2011 award, SIGSOFT noted that Dr. Reps is one of only two authors to have ever received two such awards. Complete information about the ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award and the Retrospective Award is available atwww.sigsoft.org/awards/ImpactAward.htm.
About GrammaTech:
GrammaTech’s static-analysis tools are used worldwide by startups, Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, and government agencies. The staff includes fourteen researchers with PhDs in programming languages and program analysis.