William C. Benton

Coordinates

I successfully defended and deposited my doctoral dissertation in December 2008.
From 2008 until 2017, I maintained an affiliation with the University via a non-salaried appointment as a Researcher.

My dissertation work, which was supervised by Prof. Charles Fischer, focused on developing novel program analyses to find implicit parallelism in object-oriented programs. My research and development efforts in industry have related to machine learning systems, distributed computing, configuration management, and applications of declarative programming at scale.

William C. Benton. Fast, Effective Program Analyis for Object-Level Parallelism. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Wisconsin, December 2008. More information.

William C. Benton, "Machine Learning Systems and Intelligent Applications," in IEEE Software, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 43-49, July-Aug. 2020, doi: 10.1109/MS.2020.2985224. Preprint.
William C. Benton, Robert H. Rati, and Erik J. Erlandson. Wallaby: A Scalable Semantic Configuration Service for Grids and Clouds. In Proceedings of the Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC '11). Seattle, Washington, USA 12-18 November 2011. PDF (489kb).
William C. Benton and Charles N. Fischer. Mostly-Functional Behavior in Java Programs. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI '09). Savannah, Georgia, USA 18-20 January 2009. PDF (408kb), talk slides (396kb). © Springer.
William C. Benton and Charles N. Fischer. Interactive, Scalable, Declarative Program Analysis: From Prototype to Implementation. In Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (PPDP '07). Wrocław, Poland, 14-16 July 2007. PDF (696kb). © ACM, 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.

Silex is a library of helpers for doing real-world data science with Apache Spark.
I developed DIMPLE, a logic programming framework for rapid development of static analyses and other programs that operate on programs (including preprocessors and interpreters).
capricious is a framework for repeatable randomness including a family of pseudorandom number generators and several probability distribution simulators. (capricious is also available as a RubyGem.)
Wallaby is a sophisticated semantic configuration service for HTCondor pools (see our SC2011 paper for more information), and Wallaroo is an experimental evolution of Wallaby.
Some more projects are linked from my GitHub profile or my personal software page.

College of Letters and Science Teaching Fellow. University of Wisconsin, 2007
Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award. University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department, 2006.

Handouts on developing better course materials.
Notes on using JUnit for grading CS 302 (beta)
Notes on accessing AFS from a Macintosh. (These instructions are UW-specific and have not been tested with OS X 10.5.)
A template for writing your dissertation in LaTeX.
My personal web site