Michael Ernst's students

I am very fortunate to have a group of extraordinarily talented colleagues — both students and otherwise. Current and former members of my research group are listed below. Also see their publications.

I am always seeking bright, motivated students (at the undergraduate, master's, or PhD level), postdocs, and staff to contribute to a variety of program understanding and analysis research projects. Students looking for research projects (from undergraduates to PhD dissertations) should see my list of projects and research interests for a flavor (not an exhaustive list) of potential topics. If you are not at UW, then see my current projects to get a flavor for my interests.

Students

Ph.D. students:

• Juan Carlos Alonso
• Haoran Peng
• James Yoo

Undergraduates:

• Varun Iyengar
• Allan Ji
• Benjamin Roberts
• Benedikt Schesch
• Tian Yu
• Kenneth Yang
• Elliott Zackrone

Research staff

• Suzanne Millstein
• Mark Roberts

Graduated alumni

PhDs

• Stephen McCamant
  Ph.D. dissertation (2008): “Quantitative information-flow tracking for real systems”
  Now at U. of Minnesota
• Carlos Pacheco
  Ph.D. dissertation (2009): “Directed random testing”
  Now at Google
• Shay Artzi
  Ph.D. dissertation (2009)
  Now at Amazon
• Adam Kiezun
  Ph.D. dissertation (2009): "Guided constraint-based testing"
  Now at Amazon
• Ivan Beschastnikh
  Ph.D. thesis (2013): "Modeling Systems from Logs of their Behavior"
  (co-advised with Arvind Krishnamurthy and Tom Anderson)
  Now at UBC
• Todd Schiller
  Ph.D. thesis (2014): "Reducing the usability barrier to specification and verification"
  Now at MOKA
• Colin Gordon
  Ph.D. thesis (2014): "Verifying concurrent programs by controlling alias interference"
  (co-advised with Dan Grossman)
  Now at Drexel
• Sai Zhang
  Ph.D. thesis (2014): "Effective program analyses for automated software testing and error diagnosis"
  Now at Google Research
• Kıvanç Muşlu
  Ph.D. thesis (2015): "Enhancing software development techniques via copy codebases"
  (co-advised with Yuriy Brun)
  now at Microsoft TSE
• Brian Burg
  Ph.D. thesis (2015): "Understanding dynamic behavior with tools for retroactive investigation"
  (co-advised with Andy Ko)
  now at Apple
• Konstantin Weitz
  Ph.D. thesis (2017): "Formal semantics and scalable verification for the Border Gateway Protocol using proof assistants and SMT solvers"
  (co-advised with Zach Tatlock)
  now at Google
• Alberto Goffi
  Ph.D. thesis (2018): "Automating Test Oracles Generation"
  (co-advised with Mauro Pezzè)
• Stuart Pernsteiner
  Ph.D. thesis (2018): "Practical Verification of Safety-Critical Systems"
  (co-advised with Zach Tatlock)
  now at Galois
• Calvin Loncaric
  Ph.D. thesis (2018): "Data Structure Synthesis"
  now at Oracle
• Pavel Panchekha
  Ph.D. thesis (2019): "Automated Reasoning for Web Page Layout"
  now at University of Utah (co-advised with Zach Tatlock)
• Doug Woos
  Ph.D. thesis (2019): "A step-through debugger for distributed systems"
  now at Brown University (co-advised with Tom Anderson and Zach Tatlock)
• Martin Kellogg
• Arianna Blasi
• Jordan Samhi

Master's degrees

• Laura Dean
  M.Eng. thesis (2001): “Improved Simulation of Input/Output Automata”
  Now at Soundbite Communications
• Michael Harder
  M.Eng. thesis (2002): “Improving Test Suites via Generated Specifications”
  Now at Microsoft
• Jeremy Nimmer
  M.Eng. thesis (2002): “Automatic Generation and Checking of Program Specifications”
  This thesis won the Charles and Jennifer Johnson Thesis Award.
  Now at Vanu, Inc.
• Alex Rolfe
  M.Eng. thesis (2002): “Code Versioning in a Workflow Management System”
  Now at MIT
• Ben Morse
  M.Eng. thesis (2002): “A C/C++ Front End for the Daikon Dynamic Invariant Detection System”
• Nii Dodoo
  M.Eng. thesis (2002): “Selecting Predicates for Conditional Invariant Detection Using Cluster Analysis”
  Now at Harvard Business School (previously at Oracle)
• Adrian Birka
  M.Eng. thesis (2003): “Compiler-Enforced Immutability for the Java Language”
  Now at Microsoft
• Toh Ne Win
  M.Eng. thesis (2003): “Theorem-Proving Distributed Algorithms with Dynamic Analysis”
  This thesis won the Charles and Jennifer Johnson Thesis Award.
  Now at Goldman Sachs
• Yuriy Brun
  M.Eng. thesis (2003): “Software Fault Identification via Dynamic Analysis and Machine Learning”
  Now at University of Massachusetts
• David Saff
  S.M. thesis (2004): “Automated continuous testing to speed software development”
  Now at Google
• Lee Lin
  M.Eng. thesis (2004): “Improving Adaptability via Program Steering”
  Now at Microsoft
• Alan Donovan
  S.M. thesis (2004): “Converting Java Programs to Use Generic Libraries”
  Now at Google
• Amy Williams
  S.M. thesis (2005): “Static Detection of Deadlock for Java Libraries”
  Now at MIT
• Philip Guo
  M.Eng. thesis (2006): “A Scalable Mixed-Level Approach to Dynamic Analysis of C and C++ Programs”
  This thesis won the Charles and Jennifer Johnson Thesis Award.
  Now at Stanford
• Matthew Tschantz
  M.Eng. thesis (2006): “Javari: Adding Reference Immutability to Java”
  This research won the Anna Pogosyants undergraduate research prize.
  This thesis also won the Charles and Jennifer Johnson Thesis Award.
  Now at Applied Quantitative Research
• Chen Xiao
  M.Eng. thesis (2007): “Performance Enhancements for a Dynamic Invariant Detector”
  Now at Google
• David Glasser
  M.Eng. thesis (2007): “Test Factoring with amock: Generating Readable Unit Tests from System Tests”
  Now at Google
• Matt Papi
  M.Eng. thesis (2008): "Practical Pluggable Types for Java"
  This thesis won the Charles and Jennifer Johnson Thesis Award.
  Now at TripAdvisor
• Jaime Quinonez
  M.Eng. thesis (2008): "Inference of Reference Immutability in Java"
  Now at D.E. Shaw
• Robert Rudd
  M.Eng. thesis (2010): "An Improved Scalable Mixed-Level Approach to Dynamic Analysis of C and C++ Programs"
  Now at Oracle
• Eric Spishak
  M.S. thesis (2013): A type system for regular expressions; Annotation File Utilities
  Now at Google
• Jenny Abrahamson
  M.S. thesis (2013): "Lightweight Visualizations of Distributed System Traces"
  Now at Facebook
• Stephanie Dietzel
  M.S. thesis (2013): "Improving and Extending Verigames"
  Now at Tableau
• Kellen Donohue
  M.S. thesis (2013): "Celeriac: A Daikon .NET Front End"
  Now at Google
• Tyler Rigsby
  M.S. thesis (2013): "Conflict Weighting in Verification Games"
  Now at Google
• Forrest Coward
  M.S. thesis (2014): "Scout: Focusing Developers on Expressive Contracts"
  Now at Microsoft
• Darioush Jalali
  M.S. report: "Not all mutants are equally strong: Mutation operators should not be applied indiscriminately"
  Now at Tableau
• Spencer Pearson
  M.S. report: "Evaluating and improving fault localization"
• Victoria Lin
  (co-advised with Luke Zettlemoyer)
  M.S. Report: "Program synthesis from natural language using recurrent neural networks"
• Waylon Huang
  M.S. report: "Evaluating the Effectiveness of Components of Guided Random Testing"
• Adam Geller
  Final report: "Minsaw"
• Casey Xing
• Thomas Schweizer

Bachelor's degrees

Only students who did a thesis or project for their degree are listed here. Many others participated in research, graduated, and were even co-authors on published papers.

• Jonathan Grall
  Advanced Undergraduate Project (2004): “Robocraft Programming Competition Engine”
  Now at Electronic Arts
• Aaron Iba
  Advanced Undergraduate Project (2004): “Robocraft Programming Competition Engine”
  Now at AppJet, Inc.
• Michael Gebauer
  Advanced Undergraduate Project (2006): “Extending the Personal Response System”
• David Harvison
  Advanced Undergraduate Project (2009)
• Gareth Snow
  Bachelor's project (2010): "Analysis of Mutation Testing Tools"
  Now at Zillow
• Mahmood Ali
  S.B. thesis (2010): "Type Annotations and Pluggable Type-Checking for Java"
• Timothy Vega
  Bachelor's project (2012): "Traceur: Inferring Variable Control Flow Using Synoptic With Multiple Relation Types"
• Roykrong Sukkerd
  B.S. thesis (2013): "Leveraging Data Invariants in Model Inference for Test Case Generation"
• Wing Lam
  B.S. thesis (2013): "When Tests Collide: The Impact of Order-Dependent Tests on Test Prioritization"
• Nat Mote
  B.S. thesis (2013): "Verification Games Type Systems"
• Rafael Vertido

... and many others who did research (and even got publications) but did not turn it into a thesis or final project for their degree.

Former postdocs

• Yoav Zibin
  now at Google
• Sung Kim
  now at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
• Danny Dig
  now at Oregon State University
• Yuriy Brun
  now at University of Massachusetts
• Werner Dietl
  now at University of Waterloo
• René Just
  now at University of Washington

Former research staff

• Steve Garland
  now retired
• Sandra Loosemore
  now at CodeSourcery
• Greg Sullivan
  now at BAE
• Jeff Perkins
  now at MIT CSAIL
• Doug Hoeger
  now retired
• David McArthur
  now at Oracle
• Jonathan Burke
  now at Oracle
• Javier Thaine
• Dan Brown
• Benjamin Keller
  now at UW

Back to Michael Ernst's research page.