Ondrej Lhotak has just started as an Assistant Professor, but Waterloo is an old friend. In fact, he was an undergraduate student here, a crack programmer who competed on the Waterloo Black Programming teams that won the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in 1999 and came in second in 2000. “I did my undergraduate degree here, and I had a great time. Even when I was going away to grad school I thought I might want to come back.” Not only has he returned, but he’s giving Waterloo Black a hand, helping Coach Gordon Cormack prepare this year’s team for competition.
Lhotak recently finished his doctorate at McGill under Laurie Hendren. The thrust of his research is the development of tools to help programmers generate efficient code. “My dissertation subject, broadly speaking, was program analysis. The idea is to look at a program and figure out what it’s going to do when it runs. Traditionally one would use a compiler to generate efficient code and make it go fast. Increasingly, automated program analysis is employed to help the programmer understand a program and test for errors.” While at McGill, Lhotak contributed to the development and analysis of soot, a Java optimization framework. He also collaborated on the development of abc, a compiler for the language AspectJ.
Now a member of the Programming Languages Group, Lhotak continues to work on developing faster and more precise programming analyses techniques for aspect-oriented languages. He is excited by the research possibilities here. “I particularly like the fact that CS is so close to math here. In a lot of other places there’s a real separation between the two. There’s also great breadth. I’m part of the Programming Languages Group, but I also hang out with WATFORM, which uses a different way of looking at problems similar to the ones I’m interested in. There’s so much diverse research going on, and that’s really good for generating ideas.”
2006 Oct 26
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Tel: 519-888-4567 x33293
Fax: 519-885-1208
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Last modified: Tuesday, 07-Nov-2006 09:35:04 EST
