Thomas W. Reps (born 28 May 1956, United States) is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to automatic program analysis. He holds the J. Barkley Rosser Professor & Rajiv and Ritu Batra Chair in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which he joined in 1985, and from which he retired in 2024.[1]
Reps is the author or co-author of four books and more than one hundred seventy-five papers describing his research. His work has covered a wide variety of topics, including program slicing, data-flow analysis, pointer analysis, model checking, computer security, instrumentation (computer programming), language-based program-development environments, the use of program profiling in software testing, software renovation, incremental algorithms, and attribute grammars.[2]
Reps’s work for many years focused on static analysis of stripped (binary) executables, and methods that—without relying on symbol-table or debugging information—recover intermediate representations that are similar to those the intermediate phases of a compiler creates for a program written in a high-level language. The goal is to provide a disassembler or decompiler platform that an analyst can use to understand the workings of COTS components, plugins, mobile code, and DLLs, as well as memory snapshots of worms and virus-infected code.
Reps was President and Co-founder of GrammaTech, Inc.
Awards and honors
Reps has been the recipient of the following awards:
- ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award (1983)
- National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award (1986)
- Packard Fellowship (1988)
- Humboldt Research Award (2000)
- Guggenheim Fellowship (2000)
- Horwitz, S., Reps T., and Binkley, D., “Interprocedural slicing using dependence graphs” selected as one of the 50 most influential papers from ACM PLDI, 1979-99 (2002)
- Institute for Scientific Information “Highly Cited Researcher”(2003)[3]
- European Association for Programming Languages and Systems Best-Paper Award at ETAPS (with G. Balakrishnan) (2004)
- ACM Fellow (2005)
- European Association for Programming Languages and Systems Best-Paper Award at ETAPS (with J. Lim) (2008)
- ACM SIGSOFT Retrospective Impact Paper Award (with T. Teitelbaum) (2010)
- ACM SIGSOFT Retrospective Impact Paper Award (with S. Horwitz, M. Sagiv, and G. Rosay) (2011)
- Foreign member of Academia Europaea (2013)[4]
- Ranked 8th (citations) and 4th (field rating) on Microsoft Academic Search‘s list of most-highly cited authors in the field of Programming Languages (2013),[5] and 23rd (citations) and 13th (field rating) on its list of most-highly cited authors in the field of Software Engineering (2013)[6]
- ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award (2017)
References
- ^ “Professor Tom Reps retires after 39 years of research and mentorship”.
- ^ “Home Page of Prof. Thomas W. Reps”.
- ^ “Home”. highlycited.com.
- ^ “Academy of Europe: Reps Thomas W”.
- ^ “Top authors in Programming Languages”. academic.research.microsoft.com. Archived from the original on 24 October 2012.
- ^ “Top authors in Software Engineering”. Archived from the original on 24 October 2012. Retrieved 14 October 2013.
