Posts

“Software systems are behind almost everything people do today,” says Brown CS faculty member Nikos Vasilakis, “from science and medicine to communication and artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, their vast complexity goes far beyond the understanding of their users, making even small improvements in their performance, security, or reliability feasible only for teams of experts.”

To address this problem, he’s just received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award on transformorphic computing, a fundamentally new approach to automatically and correctly improving widely deployed systems without burdening their users and with strong guarantees about their behavior. CAREER Awards are given in support of outstanding junior faculty who excel at research, education, and the integration of the two within the context of an organizational mission.

The proposed project will develop novel automated and reliable techniques that transform systems to improve their capabilities — before or during their execution. For example, classes of transformations improve performance by parallelizing, distributing, or rearranging the execution of complex systems; security by guarding against risky third-party components in a system’s supply chain; and reliability by ensuring that opaque interactions, including those involving AI agents, produce the intended results. Combined, the proposed project will yield fundamental advances in computing systems, usable open-source software, and a latent research community around transformorphic computing.

In parallel, the project will develop educational programs that prepare students to operate on and improve existing, real-world systems. Experiences from developing these and other transformations will also result in a thorough and accessible organization of knowledge on the science of transformorphic computing and a textbook that trains students to conduct research in this new field, far beyond the scope of this project — already initiated with the recent Brown course on Systems Transforming Systems, offered as both 2952R and COEX- and WRIT-designated 1952R.

“By lowering barriers to improving, extending, or specializing existing and widely deployed software systems,” Nikos tells us, “the impact of this project will benefit everyone — scientists, scholars, companies, entrepreneurs, and the general public.”

A member of the Brown CS faculty since 2022, Nikos founded the Atlas group and co-directs Brown Systems. His recent honors include publishing four papers at OSDI, receiving a Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award, a Best Artifact Award, and a Best Paper Award Runner-Up recognition; earning a Best Paper Award at the final USENIX ATC conference; receiving a Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award and an Amazon Research Award; and earning the ACM ASIACCS ‘23 Distinguished Paper Award.

Nikos joins numerous previous Brown CS winners of the award, including (in the past year alone) Deepti Raghavan, Ellis Hershkowitz, Serena Booth, and Chen Sun.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.