Todd Millstein is an American computer scientist and professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. His research focuses on software analysis, testing, and verification, including dynamic analysis, symbolic execution, and program synthesis. He has contributed to the development of tools such as KLEE, a widely used symbolic execution engine, and has worked on techniques for automated test generation, bug detection, and program repair.
Education
- Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley (2005)
Academic and Professional Positions
- Faculty member, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington (since 2008)
- Former postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond
- Former research scientist at IBM Research, Almaden
Research Contributions
- Co‑development of KLEE, an open‑source symbolic execution tool that has been integrated into multiple software testing frameworks.
- Work on automated program repair, including the creation of techniques that generate patches based on symbolic execution and test suites.
- Advances in dynamic analysis for security, such as detecting memory errors and concurrency bugs in large codebases.
- Contributions to program synthesis, enabling the automated generation of code snippets from high‑level specifications.
Selected Publications
- "KLEE: Unassisted and Automatic Generation of High‑Coverage Tests for Complex System Software" (2008) – presented at the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE).
- "Automated Program Repair via Symbolic Execution" (2015) – published in the Communications of the ACM.
- "Dynamic Detection of Data Races in Multithreaded Programs" (2012) – appeared in the Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation.
Awards and Honors
- ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award (multiple years)
- NSF CAREER Award (2011) for research on software testing and analysis
- IEEE Fellow (2023) for contributions to program analysis and software reliability
Professional Service
- Program committee member for major conferences such as PLDI, OOPSLA, and ISSTA.
- Associate editor for journals including the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
Todd Millstein’s work has had a significant impact on both academic research and industry practice in software reliability and security, influencing the design of testing tools and verification frameworks used by developers worldwide.
