George Ciprian Necula is a

Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, engineer at

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

, and former professor at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

who does research in the area of

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

s and

software engineering Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...

, with a particular focus on

software verification Software verification is a discipline of software engineering, programming languages, and theory of computation whose goal is to assure that software satisfies the expected requirements. Broad scope and classification A broad definition of verif ...

and

formal methods In computer science, formal methods are mathematics, mathematically rigorous techniques for the formal specification, specification, development, Program analysis, analysis, and formal verification, verification of software and computer hardware, ...

. He is best known for his Ph.D. thesis work first describing

proof-carrying code Proof-carrying code (PCC) is a software mechanism that allows a host system to verify properties about an application via a formal proof that accompanies the application's executable code. The host system can quickly verify the validity of the pro ...

, a work that received the 2007 SIGPLAN Most Influential POPL Paper Award.

Life and work

Originally from

Baia Mare Baia Mare ( , ; ; ; ) is a Municipiu, city along the Săsar, Săsar River, in northwestern Romania; it is the capital of Maramureș County. The city lies in the region of Maramureș, a subregion of Transylvania. It is situated about from Buchare ...

, Necula received a BS in Computer Science (1992) from the

Polytechnic University of Bucharest Politehnica University of Bucharest () is a technical university in Bucharest, Romania founded in 1818.Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

in the United States, completing his MS in Computer Science (1995) and PhD in Computer Science (1998) under programming-languages researcher Peter Lee. His PhD work introduced

, which was influential as a mechanism to allow untrusted machine code to run safely without performance overhead. He joined as faculty at the

in 1998. More recently, Necula's work has focused on open-source analysis, verification, and transformation tools for C, including the C Intermediate Language (CIL), CCure

and Deput

C Intermediate Language

C Intermediate Language (CIL) is a simplified subset of the C (programming language), C programming language, as well as a set of tools for transforming C programs into that language. Several other tools use CIL as a way to have access to a C

abstract syntax tree An abstract syntax tree (AST) is a data structure used in computer science to represent the structure of a program or code snippet. It is a tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of text (often source code) written in a formal ...

. One of these programs is

Frama-C Frama-C is a set of interoperable program analyzers for C programs. The name ''Frama-C'' stands for ''Framework for Modular Analysis of C programs''. Frama-C has been developed by the French Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergi ...

(Framework to Analyze C programs).

Awards

Necula is a Fellow of the Okawa Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (see Sloan Fellowship). He received the

Grace Murray Hopper Award The Grace Murray Hopper Award (named for computer pioneer RADM Grace Hopper) has been awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since 1971. The award goes to a computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or serv ...

in 2001, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1999, and the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2006.

References

External links

George Necula's homepage at UC Berkeley

CIL
o
GitHub
{{DEFAULTSORT:Necula, George Carnegie Mellon University alumni Living people People from Baia Mare Politehnica University of Bucharest alumni Programming language researchers Romanian computer scientists UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty Year of birth missing (living people)