Mary Lou Soffa

Department Chair and Owen. R. Cheatham Professor of Computer Science

Virtual executing environments, optimizing compilers, compilers for embedded systems, program analysis, debugging and testing, path sensitive analysis

Mary Lou Soffa is the Owen T. Cheatham Professor of Sciences and Department Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia.   From 1977 to 2004, she was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh and also served as the Dean of Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences from 1991 to 1996.

Her research interests include software tools for debugging and testing programs, virtual execution environments, optimizing compilers, and program analysis. She has published over 150 papers in journals and conferences. Her papers have received a number of best paper awards as well a designation of one of the 40 most influential papers in 20 years to appear in the Programming Language Design and Implementation Conference.   She has directed 24 Ph.D. students to completion, half of whom are women. She also directed over 50 M.S. students, with half being women.

Soffa received the Nico Habermann Award in 2006 for outstanding contributions toward increasing the numbers and successes of underrepresented members in the computing research community. In 1999, she received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. She was elected an ACM Fellow in 1999 and selected as a Girl Scout Woman of Distinction in 2003. She served for ten years on the Board of the Computing Research Association (CRA) and continues as a member of CRA-W, the committee on the status of women in computer science and engineering of the CRA.She co-founded the CRA-W Graduate Cohort Program and the CRA-W Cohort for Associate Professors.She has served on the Executive Committees of both ACM SIGSOFT and SIGPLAN as well as conference chair, program chair or program committee member of many conferences.   Currently, she is an ACM Member at Large and serves on the ACM Publications Board.  She is also the Conference Chair for the ACM Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS).

Soffa's research interests include  virtual execution enviornments, binary level optimization, path sensitive program analysis, and software tools for debugging and testing programs. One research project  deals with  developing an advanced execution system, called a Robust Execution Environment (REEact), that will dynamically adapt an application’s execution to the runtime resource landscape originating from runtime variations.  This research project  In another project, she,  with a Ph.D. student Wei Le is developing a path sensitive query based system for program analysis that is useful for detecting various types of software vulnerabilities.  She is also working on parallelizing software to exploit a multi core architecture.

• Marple: a demand-driven path-sensitive buffer overflow detector, Wei Le and Mary Lou Soffa, Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of  Software Engineering, November, 2008.
• Transparent Debugging of Dynamically Optimized Code, Naveen Kumar,  Bruce Childers and Mary Lou Soffa Code Generation and Optimization Conference, March, 2009
• A Framework for Exploring Optimization Properties, Min Zhao, Bruce Childers and Mary Lou Soffa, Compiler Conference, March, 2009
• Code Lifetime Based Memory Reduction for Virtual Execution Environments, Apala Guha, Kim Hazelwood, Mary Lou Soffa. , Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Optimizations for DSP and Embedded Systems (ODES) Boston, Massachusetts, USA. April 2008.