Michael F. Ringenburg's Home Page

I'm a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Washington. I expect to graduate in 2013. I grew up in Seattle, then spent five years at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. At Dartmouth I earned a Bachelors in Mathematics (minor in Computer Science) in 1999 and a Masters in Computer Science in 2001. My master's thesis focused on out-of-core algorithms. I was advised by Tom Cormen. After college, I spent a year and a half working on compilers and assemblers for Cray before heading to the UW in 2003. I was on leave from the UW from March 2006 to December 2011. During my leave, I worked as a software engineer at Cray, where I was the technical lead for the XMT compiler. I returned to UW in January 2012. I am part of the SAMPA (SAfe MultiProcessing Architectures) research group, advised by Dan Grossman and Luis Ceze. I am part of a team that is investigating methods to save energy by using disciplined approximate computing. My current focus is on the quality of service impacts of approximation. miker at cs dot washington dot edu

Teaching

• I am teaching CSE 401: Introduction to Compiler Construction this quarter (Winter 2013).

Publications

Journal Articles:

• Neva Cherniavsky, Gidon Shavit, Michael F. Ringenburg, Richard E. Ladner, and Eve A. Riskin. MultiStage: A MINMAX Bit Allocation Algorithm for Video Coders. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 17, 1 (2007), 59-67.

Conference and Workshop Papers:

• Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, Adrian Sampson, Michael Ringenburg, Dan Grossman, Luis Ceze, and Doug Burger. Addressing Dark Silicon Challenges with Disciplined Approximate Computing. At Dark Silicon 2012 (co-located with ISCA 2012), Portland, Oregon, June 2012.

• Michael Ringenburg and Sung-Eun Choi. Optimizing Loop-level Parallelism in Cray XMT™ Applications. Cray User Group 2009 Proceedings (CUG 2009), Atlanta, Georgia, May 2009.

• Michael F. Ringenburg and Dan Grossman. Preventing Format-String Attacks via Automatic and Efficient Dynamic Checking. Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2005), Alexandria, Virginia, November 2005, pages 354-363.
  • See our website for an implementation.

• Michael F. Ringenburg and Dan Grossman. AtomCaml: First-Class Atomicity via Rollback. Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2005), Tallinn, Estonia, September 2005, pages 92-104.
  • See our website to download a copy of AtomCaml, and some example AtomCaml programs.

• Michael F. Ringenburg and Dan Grossman. Types for Describing Coordinated Data Structures. Proceedings of TLDI '05: 2005 ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Types in Language Design and Implementation, Long Beach, California, January 2005, pages 25-36.
  • See our website for an implementation, some examples, and formal proofs of the theorems.

• Michael F. Ringenburg, Richard E. Ladner, and Eve A. Riskin. Global MINMAX Interframe Bit Allocation for Embedded Video Coding. In Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Data Compression Conference (DCC '04), Snowbird, Utah, March 2004, pages 222-231.

• Gidon Shavit, Michael F. Ringenburg, Jeff West, Richard E. Ladner, and Eve A. Riskin. Group Testing for Video Compression. In Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Data Compression Conference (DCC '04), Snowbird, Utah, March 2004, pages 212-221.

Theses:

• Michael F. Ringenburg. Applying the Vector Radix Method to Multidimensional, Multiprocessor, Out-of-Core Fast Fourier Transforms. Master's Thesis, Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, March 2001.

Research

• Current projects:

  • Disciplined Approximate Computing, Advisors: Dan Grossman and Luis Ceze

    This project investigates how we can use approximation in a safe and principled manner in order to save energy. My work focuses on studying the quality of service (QOS) impacts of approximation, and on tools to help programmers investigate the QOS impacts of changing how their code is approximated. We recently submitted a paper about one such tool for measuring and tuning QOS tradeoffs in a functional setting. This project is part of the research of the SAMPA group (SAfe MultiProcessor Architectures) at the University of Washington.

• Past projects:

  • WASP: Washington Advanced Systems for Programming. Advisor: Dan Grossman

    As software systems become simultaneously more complex and more integrated into our daily lives, the need to eliminate errors and security vulnerabilities becomes more pronounced. My work on this project aimed to use programming language-based techniques to improve software quality. Some topics we investigated include coordinated data structures, security white-listing, and enforcing strong atomicity guarantees in concurrent programs.

  • Graphics, image & video compression, Advisors: Richard Ladner and Eve Riskin

    This project involved developing a new embedded video coder, and designing a global bit-allocation algorithm that achieves nearly constant quality across the entire video. We also looked briefly at image compression, animation compression, and 3D mesh compression. See the two DCC 2004 papers listed above for more details.

  • Out-of-core algorithms (my master's thesis). Advisor: Tom Cormen

    Out-of-core algorithms are algorithms designed to be efficient even when the size of the problem is greater than the size of the computer's main memory. We developed an out-of-core, parallel, high-dimensional vector radix FFT algorithm. We also analyzed our algorithm's complexity, as well as the communication complexity of a previously developed BMMC permutation algorithm that we used as a subroutine of the FFT algorithm. See my master's thesis for details.

  • Using simulated annealing to approximate crossing numbers of complete graphs. Advisor: John Mackey

• Summer schools:

  • Summer School on Software Security: Theory to Practice, June 17-25 2004, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR

Department Activities

• 2005 Prospective Student (Visit Day) Committee
• 2004-05 Graduate Admissions Committee
• 2004-05 Graduate Mentoring Committee
• 2004 Holiday Party Coordinator
• 2004 New Graduate Student Orientation Committee Co-chair
• 2003 Pit Party Coordinator
• 2003 New Graduate Student Orientation Committee