Professor Michael Franz

An early pioneer in the areas of mobile code and dynamic compilation, at the University of California, Irvine, he leads the Secure Systems and Languages Laboratory; one of the top research teams on dynamic compilation, virtual machines and language-based computer security. He is best known for his invention, with a former Ph.D. student, of the "Trace Tree" compilation technique. In collaboration with the Mozilla foundation, his research group transitioned the JavaScript compilation technology invented in his lab into the Firefox browser, where it became the basis of the "TraceMonkey" JavaScript engine, used by hundreds of millions of people every day. He has been a Tenured Full Professor of Computer Science at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine since January 1996. His current research focuses primarily on software security and on virtual machine technology, including just-in-time compilation. Other research interests include code compression, compiling for low-power usage, programming languages and architectures for component-based software construction, and service-oriented computing. In addition, since February 2007, he holds an honorary appointment as Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (by courtesy) in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering, University of California, Irvine. From August 2010 to September 2011 (while on Sabbatical from University of California, Irvine) he was a Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich. He has graduated 17 Ph.D. students and is the Principal Investigator on a wide range of competitive grants from the federal government (NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFRL, DHS), totaling well over $10M. He earned a Diplom-Ingenieur, in Computer Science in 1989 and his Doctor of Technical Sciences, Computer Science in 1994 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) in Switzerland. His doctoral dissertation, "Code Generation On-The-Fly: A Key To Portable Software" was published in early 1994, predating the arrival of Java by two full years. He is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Scientist, a Senior Member of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in 1989, a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 1997. In 2007, he received both the U.C. Irvine?s Outstanding Professor of the Year Award from the Class of 2007; and the Dean's Award for Graduate Student Mentoring from his school. That same year, the graduating class of seniors at U.C. Irvine voted him their "Outstanding Professor of the Year. In 2010, he received the highest honor for research from his university's academic senate, the Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research. He also received the IEEE Computer Society 2012 Technical Achievement Award, "For pioneering contributions to just-in-time compilation and optimization, significantly advancing web application technology". He holds an awarded patent on mobile-code security and has several further patents pending. He has served as a technical expert witness in litigation. He is a sought after speaker and panelist, both nationally and internationally, and a frequent reviewer for conferences, journals, and funding agencies.