Ben Liblit

I was an associate professor of computer science, specializing in software engineering and programming languages. My work in this area began with a pioneering four-year field study on the practice of programming. (That is, I was an actual grownup with a real job as a software engineer.) Today it is the challenges and needs of the professional programmer that inspire my research.

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Former Students

Doctor
- Alisa Maas, Ph.D., now at Facebook (co-advised with Thomas Reps)
- Anne Mulhern, Ph.D., now at Red Hat (co-advised with Charles Fischer)
- Cindy Rubio González, Ph.D., now at University of California, Davis
- David Bingham Brown, Ph.D. (co-advised with Thomas Reps)
- Peter Ohmann, Ph.D., now at College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University
- Piramanayagam Arumuga Nainar, Ph.D., now at Google
- Tristan Ravitch, Ph.D., now at Galois, Inc.
Master
- Andrew Weinrich, now at Spencer Stuart
- Garrett Kolpin, now at Thomson West
- Marina Polishchuk, now at Microsoft
- Mark Chapman
- Steve Jackson, now at Galois, Inc.
- Naveen Neelakandan, now at Intuit
- Suhail Shergill, now at Wajam
- Zi Wang, now at University of Wisconsin–Madison
Bachelor
- Alex Diedrich, now at University of Wisconsin–Madison
- David Clipson, now at University of Wisconsin–Madison
- Jason Fletchall, now at Intuit
- Lena Olson, now at Google
- Nate Deisinger, now at Microsoft
- Rachael McCormick, now at University of Wisconsin–Madison

Bug Isolation in an Imperfect World

How many times has your computer crashed this month? My current focus is on improving software quality in a world where bugs are a fact of life. I seek practical ways to use program analysis, machine learning, and other techniques to understand and fix bugs in the real world.

Error Propagation

Finding and Fixing Bugs in Concurrent and Parallel Programs

Postmortem Program Analysis

Statistical Debugging and Cooperative Bug Isolation

The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project is putting many of the above ideas to work in a large scale, real world deployment. When theory collides with practice, fun things happen.

Dynamic Heap Type Inference

Other Bug Hunting

Languages for Scientific Computing

Your supercomputer is only as good as the code you’re running on it. As a member of the Titanium project I developed a formal basis for understanding the behavior of distributed data with applications in language design, algorithm development, programming, and optimization.

Odds and Ends

I’ve also written a few things about other facets of programming and program analysis.