Dr.  Emery D Berger

Emery Berger is a Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus of the UMass system, and has been a Visiting Scientist at Microsoft Research and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (BarcelonaTech). He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. His research spans programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance. Prof. Berger and his collaborators have created a number of influential software systems including Hoard, the first scalable memory manager (malloc), on which the Mac OS X memory manager is based; DieHard, an error-avoiding memory manager that directly influenced the design of the Windows 7 Fault-Tolerant Heap; DieHarder, a secure memory manager that was an inspiration for hardening changes made to the Windows 8 heap; the Coz profiler, which ships with modern Linux distros; and more; see http://plasma-umass.org for a full list. Prof. Berger developed and maintains CSrankings.org, a site that has been used by more than 1M users since its inception in 2016. His honors include Most Influential Paper Awards at ASPLOS, OOPSLA, and PLDI, a Microsoft Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Lilly Teaching Fellowship, a Google Research Award, and a Microsoft SEIF Award. Professor Berger is currently serving his second three-year term as an elected member-at-large of the SIGPLAN Executive Committee, where he chairs a number of awards committees. He served as Program Chair for PLDI 2016, will serve as co-Program Chair for ASPLOS 2021, and spent a decade as Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. He was named an ACM Fellow in 2019.

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  Because my research group has had a pretty good record of getting the fruits of our research adopted “in the real world”, I often get asked how to get work adopted. In this...
• Performance Matters
  Performance clearly matters to users. For example, the most common software update on the AppStore is "Bug fixes and performance enhancements." Now that Moore's Law has ended,...
• Saving the World from Spreadsheets
  Spreadsheets are one of the most widely used programming environments, with roughly 1 billion users of Microsoft Excel alone. Unfortunately, spreadsheets make it all too easy to make errors...

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