Technologies for Trustworthy Computing and Information

During the past decade information technologies have driven the productivity gains essential to U.S. economic competitiveness, and computing systems now control significant elements of critical national infrastructure. As a result, tremendous resources are devoted to ensuring that programs are correct, especially at scale. Unfortunately, in spite of developers’ best efforts, software errors are at the root of most execution errors and security vulnerabilities.

As computing devices become more pervasive, the software systems that control them have become increasingly more complex and sophisticated. Consequently, despite the tremendous resources devoted to making software more robust and resilient, ensuring that programs are correct—especially at scale—remains a difficult and challenging endeavor. Unfortunately, uncaught errors triggered during program execution can lead to potentially crippling security violations, unexpected runtime failure or unintended behavior, all of which can have profound negative consequences on economic productivity, reliability of mission-critical systems, and correct operation of important and sensitive cyber infrastructure.

Dr. Suresh Jagannathan joined DARPA in September 2013. His research interests include programming languages, compilers, program verification, and concurrent and distributed systems.