George Ciprian Necula is a

Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern, and Southeast Europe, Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, S ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

, engineer at

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

, and former professor at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

who does research in the area of

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

s and

software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

, with a particular focus on software verification and

formal methods In computer science, formal methods are mathematically rigorous techniques for the specification, development, and verification of software and hardware systems. The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the expec ...

. He is best known for his Ph.D. thesis work first describing

proof-carrying code Proof-carrying code (PCC) is a software mechanism that allows a host system to verify properties about an application via a formal proof that accompanies the application's executable code. The host system can quickly verify the validity of the proo ...

, a work that received the 2007 SIGPLAN Most Influential POPL Paper Award.

Life and work

Originally from

Baia Mare Baia Mare ( , ; hu, Nagybánya; german: Frauenbach or Groß-Neustadt; la, Rivulus Dominarum) is a municipality along the Săsar River, in northwestern Romania; it is the capital of Maramureș County. The city lies in the region of Maramureș ...

, Necula received a BS in Computer Science (1992) from the

Polytechnic University of Bucharest Politehnica University of Bucharest ( ro, Universitatea Politehnica din București) is a technical university in Bucharest, Romania. 200 years of activity have been celebrated lately, as the university was founded in 1818.Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

in the United States, completing his MS in Computer Science (1995) and PhD in Computer Science (1998) under programming-languages researcher Peter Lee. His PhD work introduced

, which was influential as a mechanism to allow untrusted machine code to run safely without performance overhead. He joined as faculty at the

in 1998. More recently, Necula's work has focused on open-source analysis, verification, and transformation tools for C, including the C Intermediate Language (CIL), CCure

and Deput

C Intermediate Language

C Intermediate Language (CIL) is a simplified subset of the C (programming language), C programming language, as well as a set of tools for transforming C programs into that language. Several other tools use CIL as a way to have access to a C

abstract syntax tree In computer science, an abstract syntax tree (AST), or just syntax tree, is a tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of text (often source code) written in a formal language. Each node of the tree denotes a construct occurring ...

. One of these programs is

Frama-C Frama-C stands for ''Framework for Modular Analysis of C programs''. Frama-C is a set of interoperable program analyzers for C programs. Frama-C has been developed by the French Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternativ ...

(Framework to Analyze C programs).

Awards

Necula is a Fellow of the Okawa Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (see

Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

). He received the

Grace Murray Hopper Award The Grace Murray Hopper Award (named for computer pioneer RADM Grace Hopper) has been awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since 1971. The award goes to a computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or serv ...

in 2001, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1999, and the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2006.

References

External links

George Necula's homepage at UC BerkeleyCIL
o
GitHub
{{DEFAULTSORT:Necula, George Carnegie Mellon University alumni Living people People from Baia Mare Politehnica University of Bucharest alumni Programming language researchers Romanian computer scientists UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty Year of birth missing (living people)