James Larus is the Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at one of the world’s leading universities, EPFL, Lausanne Switzerland, and a 16 year veteran and Director in Microsoft Research. Beatdapp is fortunate to welcome a technical expert of Larus’ caliber to our team as an Advisor Board member.
“James Larus is a peerless technical expert, a leading contributor to the field of computer science and a world-class mentor,” said Beatdapp Co-Founder and CTO Pouria Assadipour. “With Jim advising our team, we will work smarter to push the boundaries of what is already leading edge technology developed at Beatdapp. Jim is a true force multiplier and we are delighted to have him in our corner.”
Larus has published over 100 papers (with 9 best and most influential paper awards) with nearly eleven thousand citations of his work across peer-reviewed academia, has received over 40 US patents, and served on numerous program committees and NSF, NRC, and DARPA panels. His book, Transactional Memory (Morgan Claypool) appeared in 2007. Larus received a National Science Foundation Young Investigator award in 1993 and became an ACM Fellow in 2006. Larus received his MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and an AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard.
“I’ve worked with a number of high performing product and development teams during my career both at Microsoft and as an academic. In Beatdapp I see the right mix of technical talent, curiosity and determination to build something great,” said Larus of his interactions with the team. “I’m excited to share my experience, to ask the tough questions, and to help the team continue to excel technically for many years to come.”
Larus joined Microsoft Research in 1998 to start and lead the Software Productivity Tools (SPT) group, which developed and applied a variety of innovative program analysis techniques to build tools to find software defects. This group’s ground-breaking research in program analysis and software defect detection is widely recognized by the research community, as well as being shipped in Microsoft products such as the Static Driver Verifier, FX/Cop, and other software development tools. Larus became an MSR Research Area Manager for programming languages and tools and started the Singularity research project, which demonstrated that modern programming languages and software engineering techniques can fundamentally improve software architectures. Subsequently, he helped start XCG, an effort in MSR to develop hardware and software support for cloud computing. In XCG, Larus started the development of the Orleans framework for cloud programming and the Catapult FPGA accelerator for the Bing search engine.
Before joining Microsoft, Larus was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he published approximately 60 research papers and co-led the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel (WWT) research project with Professors Mark Hill and David Wood. WWT was a DARPA and NSF-funded project investigating new approaches to simulating, building, and programming parallel shared-memory computers. Larus’ research spanned a number of areas: including new and efficient techniques for measuring and recording executing programs’ behavior, tools for analyzing and manipulating compiled and linked programs, programming languages for parallel computing, tools for verifying program correctness, and techniques for compiler analysis and optimization.
