Baris Kasikci awarded Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship

Prof. Baris Kasikci has been awarded a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, which recognizes his exceptional talent for research and innovation and highlights him as an emerging leader in his field. Kasikci is the first faculty member at the University of Michigan to receive the early-career award since its launch in 2005. He is one of five winners among what CTO of Microsoft Azure Victor Bahl calls “a record number of nominations,” totalling nearly 300.

Provisions of the 2021 award include $100,000 awarded annually for two years starting in the fall of 2021.

Kasikci’s group builds efficient and trustworthy computer systems that improve the efficiency of data center applications, provide systems support for heterogeneous platforms, find and fix bugs, and improve hardware security. His lab uses programming languages methods to automate bug detection across a range of different complex systems and applications. Some of his recent work includes:

• A number of new tools to automate the formal verification of distributed systems.
• The development of “micropatches” for complex software systems to allow easier updates to security of deployed vehicles, spacecraft, and more.
• In a pair of recent projects, Agamotto and Hippocrates, his group began to explore how to automatically detect and repair bugs in applications designed to make use of powerful new persistent memory technology.
• A technique for using mountains of data produced by everyday program use to automate the detection and repair of software bugs in widely-used applications.

Kasikci’s previous recognitions include an NSF CAREER award, an Intel Rising Star Award, a Google Faculty Award, a VMware Early Career Grant, multiple Intel awards, and a VMware fellowship. He has received the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI’18, an IEEE MICRO Top Picks Award, the Roger Needham Ph.D. Award for the best PhD thesis in computer systems in Europe, and the Patrick Denantes Memorial Prize for best PhD thesis in Computer Science at EPFL.

Previously, Kasikci was a researcher in the Systems and Networking Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at EPFL and has held roles at Intel, VMware, and Siemens.