Monica Sin-Ling Lam is an American computer scientist. She is a professor in the Computer Science Department at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

Professional biography

Monica Lam received a B.Sc. from

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university, public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks a ...

in 1980 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from

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 1987. Lam joined the faculty of Computer Science at

in 1988. She has contributed to the research of a wide range of computer systems topics including

compilers In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

program analysis In computer science, program analysis is the process of automatically analyzing the behavior of computer programs regarding a property such as correctness, robustness, safety and liveness. Program analysis focuses on two major areas: program op ...

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also inc ...

security Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social ...

computer architecture In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, t ...

, and

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

. More recently, she is working in

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

, and

virtual assistants Virtual may refer to: * Virtual (horse), a thoroughbred racehorse * Virtual channel, a channel designation which differs from that of the actual radio channel (or range of frequencies) on which the signal travels * Virtual function, a programming ...

with an emphasis on privacy protection. She is the faculty director of the Open Virtual Assistant Lab, which organized the first workshop for the World Wide Voice Web. The lab developed the

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

Almond

voice assistant An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions. The term "chatbot" is sometimes used to refer to virtual ...

, which is sponsored by the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

. Almond received

Popular Science ''Popular Science'' (also known as ''PopSci'') is an American digital magazine carrying popular science content, which refers to articles for the general reader on science and technology subjects. ''Popular Science'' has won over 58 awards, incl ...

's Best of What's New award in 2019. Previously, Lam led the SUIF (Stanford University Intermediate Format) Compiler project, which produced a widely used

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

infrastructure known for its locality optimizations and interprocedural parallelization. Many of the compiler techniques she developed have been adopted by industry. Her other research projects included the architecture and compiler for the CMU Warp machine, a

systolic array In parallel computer architectures, a systolic array is a homogeneous network of tightly coupled data processing units (DPUs) called cells or nodes. Each node or DPU independently computes a partial result as a function of the data received from i ...

VLIW Very long instruction word (VLIW) refers to instruction set architectures designed to exploit instruction level parallelism (ILP). Whereas conventional central processing units (CPU, processor) mostly allow programs to specify instructions to exe ...

processors, and the

Stanford DASH Stanford DASH was a cache coherent multiprocessor developed in the late 1980s by a group led by Anoop Gupta, John L. Hennessy, Mark Horowitz, and Monica S. Lam at Stanford University. It was based on adding a pair of directory boards designed at ...

distributed shared memory In computer science, distributed shared memory (DSM) is a form of memory architecture where physically separated memories can be addressed as a single shared address space. The term "shared" does not mean that there is a single centralized memor ...

machine. In 1998, she took a sabbatical leave from Stanford to help start Tensilica Inc., a company that specializes in configurable processor cores. In another research project, her program analysis group developed a collection of tools for improving

software security Application security (short AppSec) includes all tasks that introduce a secure software development life cycle to development teams. Its final goal is to improve security practices and, through that, to find, fix and preferably prevent security i ...

and reliability. They developed the first scalable context-sensitive inclusion-based pointer analysis and a freely available tool called BDDBDDB, that allows programmers to express context-sensitive analyses simply by writing

Datalog Datalog is a declarative logic programming language. While it is syntactically a subset of Prolog, Datalog generally uses a bottom-up rather than top-down evaluation model. This difference yields significantly different behavior and properties ...

queries. Other tools developed include Griffin, static and dynamic analysis for finding security vulnerabilities in Web applications such as

SQL injection In computing, SQL injection is a code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution (e.g. to dump the database contents to the attacker). SQL inj ...

, a static and dynamic program query language called QL, a static memory leak detector called Clouseau, a dynamic buffer overrun detector called CRED, and a dynamic error diagnosis tool called DIDUCE. In the Collective project, her research group and she developed the concept of a livePC: subscribers of the livePC will automatically run the latest of the published PC virtual images with each reboot. This approach allows computers to be managed scalably and securely. In 2005, the group started a company called MokaFive to transfer the technology to industry. She also directed the MobiSocial laboratory at Stanford, as part of the Programmable Open Mobile Internet 2020 initiative. Lam is also the cofounder of Omlet, which launched in 2014. Omlet is the first product from MobiSocial. Omlet is an open, decentralized social networking tool, based on an extensible chat platform. Lam chaired the

ACM ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing * ...

SIGPLAN Programming Languages Design and Implementation Conference in 2000, served on the Editorial Board of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems and numerous program committees for conferences on languages and compilers (PLDI, POPL), operating systems (SOSP), and computer architecture (ASPLOS, ISCA).

Awards

Lam has received the following awards and honors: *

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

member, 2019 *

Computer Science 50th Anniversary Research Award, 2018 * Fellow of the ACM, 2007 * ACM Programming Language Design and Implementation Best Paper Award in 2004 * ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award in 2002 * ACM Most Influential Programming Language Design and Implementation Paper Award in 2001 * NSF Young Investigator award in 1992 * Two of her papers were recognized in "20 Years of PLDI--a Selection (1979-1999)" * One of her papers was recognized in the "25 Years of the International Symposia on Computer Architecture", 1988.

Bibliography

* '' Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools (2d Ed)'' (2006) (the "Dragon Book") by Alfred V. Aho, Monica S. Lam,

Ravi Sethi Ravi Sethi (born 1947) is an Indian computer scientist retired from executive roles at Bell Labs and Avaya Labs. He also serves as a member of the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Advisory Co ...

, and

Jeffrey D. Ullman Jeffrey David Ullman (born November 22, 1942) is an American computer scientist and the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, at Stanford University. His textbooks on compilers (various editions are popularly known as the ...

() * ''A Systolic Array Optimizing Compiler'' (1989) () * Monica Lam, Dissertation
A Systolic Array Optimizing Compiler
' (1987); Advisor:

H. T. Kung Hsiang-Tsung Kung (; born November 9, 1945) is a Taiwanese-born American computer scientist. He is the William H. Gates professor of computer science at Harvard University. His early research in parallel computing produced the systolic array i ...

References

External links

Tree of Monica Lam's students
*

Monica Lam interview on MokaFive's background
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lam, Monica Living people American computer scientists Carnegie Mellon University alumni Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Programming language researchers Stanford University School of Engineering faculty University of British Columbia alumni American women computer scientists Year of birth missing (living people) Natural language processing researchers