Research Goals, Philosophy, and Methodology

The primary goal of my career is to have lasting, positive impact in the areas of computer systems and computer security. There is a dire and pervasive need for computers to be more secure. My research targets real world problems and deploys solutions to these problems in practice. My goal is to solve problems that make a difference in people's lives.

My lab looks for unaddressed real world problems where a solution created by our team would be likely to make a tangible difference. Throughout the process of devising a solution we focus on practical concerns such as the deployability of solutions and the incentives for adoptors to do so. Following this, we work with appropriate partners to deploy our research into pratice. From these deployments we learn about new real world problems and use these to drive these new research projects.

Practical impact often necessitates a deployment and thus takes many man-years of effort beyond a typical research project. Thus, I recruit not only students focused on research to participate in my research group. I also recruit students that are interested in industry positions. These students get valuable hands-on experience with building and maintaining software deployed in production. The end result is that my research group has a substantial number of participants, including researchers with a PhD to students still in high school.

Students I work with tend to love and embrace the practicality of their work. We celebrate and work hard to foster large deployments of software (of which we have been fortunate to have some success). We are a group of bright and motivated researchers that (in addition to publishing papers) work to produce software that changes the world. If you have a similar passion, I invite you to apply to join us!