Ben Zorn Software Design and Implementation Group Microsoft Research One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052 Office: (425) 703-6290; FAX: (425) 936-7329 E-Mail: zorn at microsoft dot com

I am a Principal Researcher, leading the Software Design and Implementation group in Microsoft Research.  I am also an Adjoint Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, where I worked from 1990-1998.  I have a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1982) and a MS (1984) and PhD (1989) from the University of California at Berkeley.  My research interests include programming language design and implementation and performance measurement and analysis. I have served previously as an Associate Editor of the ACM journals Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems and Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization and I am currently a member of the ACM SIGPLAN Executive Committee.  For further information about my research, please see my vita.

Related Activities:

• Program co-Chair (with Onur Mutlu), 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC'08)
• SIGPLAN Executive Committee, Member-at-Large (July 2007 - June 2009)
  • I co-administer the SIGPLAN Professional Activities Committee (PAC) with Koen De Bosschere
    We provide financial support for many professional activities, including student travel.  Check it out!
• Program Committee, 2007 Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES'07) 
• Program Committee, 2007 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO 2007)
• Program co-Chair (with Kevin Skadron), Fifteenth International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT-2006)
• Program Committee, Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-III)
• Program Committee, 4th Annual International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO-4)
• Program Chair, 3rd Workshop on Memory System Performance (MSP'05)
• Ben's CLI Benchmarks - a collection of compute-intensive CLI programs
• Co-chair (with Hoi Vo), 2nd Workshop on Managed Runtime Environments (MRE'04)

Recent Presentations:

• "Samurai: Protecting Critical Data in Unsafe Languages" (pdf), EuroSys 2008, Glasgow, Scotland, April 2008
• "Tolerating and Correcting Memory Errors in C and C++" (pdf), Microsoft Research Cambridge, April 2008.
• "Programming Languages for Building Trustworthy Systems" (pdf), Information Trust Institute, 4th ITI Workshop on Dependability and Security: Opportunities and Challenges in Building an Overarching Community (November 2007).
• "Tolerating and Correcting Memory Errors in C and C++" (pdf), University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, November 2007.
• "DieHard: Memory Error Fault Tolerance in C and C++"  (pdf), Microsoft, June 2007.
• "Software Fault Tolerance for Unsafe Languages",  University of British Columbia, Dec. 2006.
• "Execution Environments for Building Dependable Systems", Invited talk at the 3rd Workshop on Managed Runtime Environments (MRE'05).
• "Thoughts on the Future of Runtime Systems", IBM Invitational Workshop on the Future of Virtual Execution Environments (VEE'04).
• "Performance in the Age of Trustworthy Computing",  University of Colorado and others, 2004.

Recent publications:

• Paruj Ratanaworabhan, Martin Burtscher, Darko Kirovski, Rahul Nagpal, Karthik Pattabiraman, and Benjamin Zorn, "Detecting and Tolerating Asymmetric Races",  ICES Tech Report Number 08-06. Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, April 2008 (submitted for publication).
• Gene Novark, Emery D. Berger, Benjamin G. Zorn, "Plug: Automatically Tolerating Memory Leaks in C and C++ Applications", Department of Computer Science Tech Report 08-09, University of Massachusetts, April 2008 (submitted for publication).
• Karthik Pattabiraman, Vinod Grover and Benjamin Zorn, "Samurai: Protecting Critical Data in Unsafe Languages", EuroSys 2008, Glasgow, Scotland, April 2008.
• Vitaliy B. Lvin, Gene Novark, Emery D. Berger, Benjamin G. Zorn, "Archipelago: Trading Address Space for Reliability and Security", Thirteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '08), Seattle, WA, March 2008.
• Emery D. Berger and Benjamin G. Zorn, "DieHard: Efficient Probabilistic Memory Safety", Department of Computer Science Tech Report 07-17, University of Massachusetts, April 2008 (submitted for publication, supersedes PLDI'06 paper).
• Gene Novark, Emery D. Berger, Benjamin G. Zorn, "Exterminator: Automatically Correcting Memory Errors with High Probability", ACM SIGPLAN 2007 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'07), pp 1-11, San Diego, CA, June 2007.
• Johannes Helander and Benjamin Zorn,  "Medina: Combining Evidence to Build Trust", (Slides PPT, PDF), Web 2.0 Security & Privacy 2007 (W2SP 2007), Oakland, CA, May 2007.
• Rahul Nagpal, Karthik Pattabiraman, Darko Kirovski, and Benjamin Zorn, "ToleRace: Tolerating and Detecting Races", Second Workshop on Software Tools for Multi-Core Systems (STMCS), San Jose, CA, March 2007.
• D. Kirovski, B.G. Zorn, R. Nagpal, and K. Pattabiraman, "An Oracle for Tolerating and Detecting Asymmetric Races". Microsoft Research Technical Report, MSR-TR-2007-122, 2007.
• Karthik Pattabiraman, Vinod Grover, and Benjamin G. Zorn, "Software Critical Memory - All Memory is Not Created Equal", Microsoft Research, Tech Report MSR-TR-2006-128, September 2006.
• Emery D. Berger and Benjamin G. Zorn,  "DieHard: Probabilistic Memory Safety for Unsafe Languages", ACM SIGPLAN 2006 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'06), pp 158-168, Ottawa, Canada, June 2006.
• Emery D. Berger, Benjamin G. Zorn, and Kathryn S. McKinley, "Reconsidering Custom Memory Allocation", 17th ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA'02), pp 1-12, November 2002.
• Martin Burtscher, Benjamin G. Zorn "Hybrid Load-Value Predictors", IEEE Transactions on Computers, 51(7), pp. 759-774, 2002.
• Emery D. Berger, Benjamin G. Zorn, and Kathryn S. McKinley, "Composing High-Performance Memory Allocators", Programming Languages Design and Implementation '01 (PLDI'01), June 2001. (Presentation in ppt.)
• Matthew L. Seidl and Benjamin G. Zorn, "Implementing Heap-Object Behavior Prediction Efficiently and Effectively", Software-Practice and Experience, 31(9), pp 869-892, 2001.

This page is maintained by Ben Zorn (zorn at microsoft dot com).