.2 Contributions

The research community is faced with a perfect storm of challenges arising from society’s increasing reliance on computers, the increasing complexity of software, and the emergence of commodity multi-core architectures. To meet these challenges we must investigate hard problems such as program verification, program understanding, and (semi-)automatic parallelization, all of which directly benefit from my thesis work—a set of new and highly scalable algorithms for pointer analysis, a fundamental problem in program analysis. Its fundamental nature is precisely why I chose to study pointer analysis; advances in this one problem can have an impact across many different program analyses used for many different purposes, including the ones mentioned above. The first two sections of this statement describe (1) the advances I have made in pointer analysis, and (2) my vision for radically changing pointer analysis to make it more usable and accessible by its consumers. While pointer analysis is an important tool, it is obviously not sufficient by itself, thus my research interests extend beyond pointer analysis and encompass the general area of programming languages and related systems. The last section of this statement describes some of my ideas for future work dealing with issues of concurrency and abstraction. While these ideas are a departure from my current work, they do leverage my experience in pointer analysis.