Michael Franz is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on just-in-time compilation and optimisation and on artificial software diversity. He is a Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science in the

Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences The Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, also known colloquially as UCI's School of ICS or simply the Bren School, is an academic unit of University of California, Irvine (UCI), and the only dedicated school of computer scienc ...

at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (by courtesy) in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UCI, and Director of UCI's Secure Systems and Software Laboratory. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

, a Fellow of the IFIP, a recipient of the

Computer Society's Technical Achievement Award and of a

Humboldt Prize The Humboldt Prize, the Humboldt-Forschungspreis in German, also known as the Humboldt Research Award, is an award given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany to internationally renowned scientists and scholars who work outside of G ...

Biography

Born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, Franz attended the Christianeum in Hamburg and the

Gordonstoun Gordonstoun School is a co-educational independent school for boarding and day pupils in Moray, Scotland. It is named after the estate owned by Sir Robert Gordon in the 17th century; the school now uses this estate as its campus. It is located ...

School in Elgin, Scotland and eventually graduated from the Christianeum with an accelerated high school diploma ("vorgezogenes Abitur") ahead of the rest of his class. After completing military service in Germany, Franz moved to Switzerland to begin studies of computer science at

ETH Zurich (colloquially) , former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule , image = ETHZ.JPG , image_size = , established = , type = Public , budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021) , rector = Günther Dissertori , president = Joël Mesot , ac ...

, finishing his Diplom-Ingenieur degree in 1989. During his undergraduate years, he was President of ETH's Computer Science Students Association. Declining a Full

Fulbright scholarship The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...

that would have funded doctoral studies in the United States, he stayed at ETH and began doctoral studies under the supervision of

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in compu ...

Winner

Niklaus Wirth Niklaus Emil Wirth (born 15 February 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist. He has designed several programming languages, including Pascal (programming language), Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he w ...

, completing his Doctor of Technical Sciences degree in 1994. Following two further years at ETH Zurich as a Senior Research Associate and lecturer, he joined the University of California, Irvine as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in January 1996. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and Full Professor in 2006. Since 2007, he has held a second appointment in UCI's School of Engineering, as a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (by courtesy). In 2016, he was awarded the title Chancellor's Professor.

Research

Franz's doctoral dissertation, entitled "Code Generation On-The-Fly: A Key To Portable Software" proposed to make software portable among different target computer architectures by way of using on-the-fly compilation at

load time In computer systems a loader is the part of an operating system that is responsible for loading programs and libraries. It is one of the essential stages in the process of starting a program, as it places programs into memory and prepares them ...

from a semantic dictionary encoding, a compressed intermediate data structure. Two years later, the Java programming language and system were launched and took this idea mainstream, albeit using the term "just-in-time compilation" instead of the term "on-the-fly compilation" that Franz had used. Franz was also one of the first academics to realise that JavaScript was going to be huge. At a time when most of the academic community was ignoring JavaScript and similar dynamic languages as "little scripting languages," Franz and his student

Andreas Gal Andreas Gal is former chief technology officer at Mozilla. He is most notable for his work on several open source projects and Mozilla technologies. Gal was born in Szeged, Hungary and grew up in Lübeck, Germany. During high school he worked on ...

researched how one would best tackle the specific features of a dynamically typed language in a just-in-time compiler. The resulting technique, Trace Tree Compilation, is now covered by a U.S. Patent. Franz took this idea to

Brendan Eich Brendan Eich (; born July 4, 1961) is an American computer programmer and technology executive. He created the JavaScript programming language and co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He served as ...

, the inventor of JavaScript and Mozilla's CTO at the time, and a collaborative project between UCI and Mozilla was born that eventually culminated in the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine in Firefox. Franz has been one of the main drivers of the "Moving Target Defense" movement for cyber security. He has been pioneering compiler-generated software diversity as a defence mechanism against software attacks, inspired by biodiversity in nature. This project has attracted attention beyond academia, with coverage in the popular press ranging from as far as The Economist to Wired Magazine. Franz and some of his students hold a U.S. Patent on some of the underlying ideas.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Franz, Michael Living people American computer scientists Programming language researchers Computer security academics People educated at Gordonstoun Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellow Members of the IEEE ETH Zurich alumni University of California, Irvine faculty People from Irvine, California Humboldt Research Award recipients 1964 births