7/20/2016 By Laura Schmitt, CS @ ILLINOIS
Written by By Laura Schmitt, CS @ ILLINOIS
CS Professor Vikram Adve was one of seven Urbana campus faculty members selected as a 2015 University Scholar—a distinction that recognizes faculty achievements as researchers, instructors and members of broader academic communities. Adve has made influential contributions to compiler design and to programming languages, areas that are foundational to how software is developed.
“Past University Scholars have included many of the most distinguished and well-respected members of our faculty,” said Adve. “It is both humbling and exciting to be included in this list. Our successes as engineering faculty are a direct function of our PhD students’ successes, and I wish to acknowledge their valued contributions.”
Adve and his graduate student Chris Lattner (MS CS ’02, PhD ’05) created the innovative, award-winning LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, which has had a broad impact both on commercial products and on research. Released in 2003, LLVM is a language-independent collection of programming technologies that help turn programming language into machine code. LLVM has been incorporated into products made by Apple, Adobe, AMD, Cray, Google, Intel, National Instruments, nVidia, Sony, and many others. In 2013 Adve and Lattner received the ACM Software System Award for their work on LLVM.
Two of Adve’s graduate students have won major dissertation awards. Robert Bocchino (PhD CS ’10) received the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN Outstanding Dissertation Award for developing Deterministic Parallel Java, which proposed new language mechanisms that provide the strongest parallelism safety guarantees of any existing system.
More recently, John Criswell (PhD CS ’14) received an ACM Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention Award in June 2015 for developing a Secure Virtual Architecture for commodity software systems. Criswell investigated security issues related to the operating system kernel, which is the foundation upon which all application software is built.
As a University Scholar, Adve will receive $45,000 over three years to pay for travel to conferences, lab equipment, research assistants, books, or other purposes.