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Emina Torlak, Xi Wang join the UW CSE faculty

UW CSE is delighted to announce our third and fourth hires of the 2014 faculty recruiting season.

EminaTorlakEmina Torlak, a researcher in software engineering and programming languages, received her Bachelors (2003), Masters (2004), and Ph.D. (2009) degrees from MIT, and subsequently worked at IBM Research, LogicBlox, and as a research scientist at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on automating and improving the programming process; in particular, she is an expert in using SAT-solvers and constraint languages for automatic reasoning about software. Emina has applied her expertise broadly, from test-generation for databases to memory-consistency models. Her recent work relates to integrating constraint solvers into programming languages to support automatic testing, verification, and synthesis – making programming a collaboration between humans and machines. She is the creator of the Kodkod constraint solver, which has been used by dozens of research projects.

Xi Wang, a researcher in computer systems whose work intersects operating systems, computer security, and programming languages, seeks to Xiimprove all levels of the trusted computing base; for example, his paper on the analysis and impact of security compromises resulting from compiler optimizations won a best paper award at the most recent ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. His research has already had significant real-world impact: his static analysis tools are used by companies such as Dropbox, Cloudera, and Intel, his record/replay and debugging systems have been integrated into the production pipeline of Bing, and his work on undeļ¬ned compiler behavior is being standardized by the C++ standards committee. Xi will receive his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT this summer. He received Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from Tsinghua University in 2005 and 2008, respectively.

Welcome, Emina and Xi!

Read about our first two hires of the 2014 faculty recruiting season, Yejin Choi and Franzi Roesner, here.