Dawson R. Engler is an American computer scientist. He is an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University.

Career

After graduating from the University of Arizona, Engler received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998. During his studies, he worked with Frans Kaashoek in the MIT CSAIL Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group. His research focused on the exokernel.

Engler is now an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University. In 2002, he started a company called Coverity with some of his students. The company aimed to turn his group’s work in static code analysis—technology used to find mistakes in computer programs—into a business.

Awards and honors

Engler and his colleagues won the Best Paper award at USENIX's OSDI conferences in 2000, 2004, and 2008. He shared the 2018 SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award with his students, Cristian Cadar and Daniel Dunbar, for their paper presented at the 2008 conference.

Engler received the 2006 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award for his research on operating systems. In 2008, he was honored with the Grace Murray Hopper Award for important work on automated program checking and finding bugs.

Selected publications

• Cadar, C.; Dunbar, D.; Engler, D. (December 8, 2008). "Klee: Creating thorough tests without human help for complex software systems." Published in the 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2008, pages 209–224.
• Engler, D. R.; Kaashoek, M. F.; O'Toole, J. (1995). "Exokernel." Published in the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, SOSP '95, pages 251–266. DOI: 10.1145/224056.224076. ISBN: 0897917154. S2CID: 221932539.
• Cadar, Cristian; Ganesh, Vijay; Pawlowski, Peter M.; Dill, David L.; Engler, Dawson R. (2006). "EXE: Automatically generating inputs of death." Published in the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, pages 322–335. DOI: 10.1145/1180405.1180445. ISBN: 1595935185. S2CID: 209393318.
• Engler, Dawson; Ashcraft, Ken (December 2003). "RacerX: effective, static detection of race conditions and deadlocks." Published in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 37, Issue 5, pages 237–252. DOI: 10.1145/1165389.945468.
• Engler, Dawson; Chen, David Yu; Hallem, Seth; Chou, Andy; Chelf, Benjamin (December 2001). "Bugs as deviant behavior: a general approach to inferring errors in systems code." Published in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 35, Issue 5, pages 57–72. DOI: 10.1145/502059.502041.