Andrew Quinn selected for Microsoft research PhD fellowship

Andrew Quinn, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Engineering program, has received a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship for the 2017 – 2019 academic years.

The Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship is a two-year fellowship program for PhD students enrolled in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or Mathematics. Recipients receive full tuition for their program, along with a living expense and a conference attendance stipend. In addition, the fellows are offered the opportunity to intern with a Microsoft researcher.

Andrew’s research creates cluster-scale systems that allow developers to quickly understand and debug programs. The community has designed many powerful dynamic analyses that help programmers debug software, such as backwards slicing, dynamic information flow tracking, memory checkers, invariant checkers and data-race detectors. While these analyses are incredibly useful for debugging, developers only use them on extremely challenging bugs because of their high overheads; for example, it can take hours to calculate the backwards slice of a complex program. Andrew’s work on JetStream (OSDI ’16) parallelizes dynamic information flow tracking. JetStream reduces the latency of information flow from minutes to seconds and enables information flow to be used interactively. Andrew is currently working on parallelizing dynamic analyses that are commonly used for debugging software.

Andrew Quinn is a 2nd year Ph.D. student studying with Prof. Jason Flinn. In 2014, he graduated Summa Cum Laude from Denison University with a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics. From 2014 to 2015, Andrew worked as a software engineer for IBM. In 2015, Andrew got married and he and his wife now reside in Ann Arbor where they enjoy cooking together, cycling classes, and their dog, Huckleberry.