Brian Demsky

Assistant Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine

email:
office: ET 544E
phone: (949) 824-0356
fax: (949) 824-3203

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Irvine. I hold a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences.

Students: I am currently seeking brilliant, motivated (graduate or undergraduate) students to work on exciting research projects.

Research Interests

My current research interests are in compilation, program analysis, and software engineering. Some of my group's ongoing research includes:

Robust Software Systems We have a developed a language-based approach for building robust software systems. This approach decomposes software systems into a set of a tasks, and uses task specifications to describe how to combine these tasks. In the event of a failure, our system reasons about these task specifications to adapt the execution and continue to provide service.
Software Design for Multi- and Many- Core Processors Developing software for future multi-core processors will require new software design methodologies, programming languages, and tools. This research investigates a new design methodology for developing the parallel software systems that are necessary to take advantage of multi-core processors. This new design process enables the software developer to create flexible system designs that easily accommodate refinement of how the computation is realized. It does this by separating the functional design of the software system from the specification of how to organize the computation. This research project investigates the construction of synthesis and profiling tools that can be used to develop and refine these functional and organizational specifications. These specifications are in turn used to create an executable that is optimized for the specific multi-core microprocessor.
Analysis of Software Bugs We have built a prototype tool to automatically build a repository of software bugs. For each software bug, our tool records a test case that reveals the bug, a version of the program that contains the bug, and the change that corrects the software bug. We are in the process of using this tool to collect information and plan to mine this information to discover properties of software bugs.
Data Structure Repair We have developed data structure repair, a technique to enable programs to recover from data structure corruption errors. This technique can be applied to both volatile data structures inside a running program and persistent data structures stored on disk.

Research Projects

Bristlecone Language

Our group has developed Bristlecone, a new programming language for developing robust software systems. We intend developers to use the Bristlecone language to specify both the high-level architecture of a software system, including how the software system's conceptual operations interact, and the low-level operational details, including the sequence of instructions that comprise an individual conceptual operation. We have developed a prototype compiler and runtime system for Bristlecone.

Data Structure Repair

Data structure repair is a technique for detect and repairing errors in data structures. We have developed a compiler that automatically generates a data structure repair algorithm from a declarative data structure consistency specification.

Courses

EECS221 Compilers, Program Analysis, and Software Engineering
Winter 07

EECS215 Design and Analysis of Algorithms
Fall 06

EECS114 Engineering Data Structures and Algorithms
Fall 06

EECS10 Computational Methods in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering
Winter 06

Select Publications

AFID: An Automated Fault Identification Tool
Alex Edwards, Sean Tucker, Sebastien Worms, Rahul Vaidya, and Brian Demsky
To appear in Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
July 2008

Bristlecone: A Language for Robust Software Systems
Brian Demsky and Alokika Dash
To appear in Proceedings of the 22nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming
July 2008

Static Analysis of Task Interactions in Bristlecone for Program Understanding
Brian Demsky and Sivaji Sundaramurthy
Technical Report UCI-ISR-07-7
October 2007

Bristlecone: A Language for Robust Software Systems
Brian Demsky and Alokika Dash
Technical Report UCI-ISR-07-6
October 2007

Goal-Directed Reasoning for Specification-Based Data Structure Repair
Brian Demsky and Martin C. Rinard
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
December 2006

Inference and Enforcement of Data Structure Consistency Specifications
Brian Demsky, Michael D. Ernst, Philip J. Guo, Stephen McCamant, Jeff H. Perkins, and Martin Rinard
Proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
July 2006

Data Structure Repair Using Goal-Directed Reasoning
Brian Demsky and Martin C. Rinard
Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Software Engineering
May 2005
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award

Automatic Detection and Repair of Errors in Data Structures
Brian Demsky and Martin C. Rinard
Proceedings of the 18th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications
October 2003

Role-Based Exploration of Object-Oriented Programs
Brian Demsky and Martin C. Rinard
Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Software Engineering
Orlando, Florida May 2002

Complete List

Presentations

Complete List