The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering awarded Dr. Jeff Huang with a 2019 Early Career Researcher Award at their annual conference in May for outstanding contributions in the area of theory and practice of debugging and verifying concurrent programs.
The Early Career Researcher Award recognizes the contributions and impact on the software engineering community of one recipient who graduated with a computer-related educational degree within the last seven years.
Huang, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, has focused his research efforts on connecting the theoretical work from academia, new ideas and technology, to the practical industry side.
“Software is like the foundation of many applications we care about today,” Huang said. “For machine learning, cybersecurity, big data applications or cloud computing, everything is based on software. If the foundation has a problem, then all the higher-level layers will be affected. We need people to help build great software.”
Huang’s current project centers on developing a virtual expert pair programmer that can enhance a human programmers’ ability to write correct and secure software.
“I have always been fascinated with software because software can create a virtual world of arbitrarily complex things, limited only by our imagination,” Huang said.
He also recently received one of five Facebook Continuous Reasoning research awards on the topic of continuous reasoning: differential concurrency analysis.