James Larus
Professor
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Professor and former Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Larus was previously a researcher, Manager, and Director at Microsoft Research for over 16 years and an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.
Larus has been an active contributor to the programming languages, compiler, software engineering, and computer architecture communities. He has published over 100 papers (with nine best and most influential paper awards), received 30 US patents, and served on numerous program committees and NSF, NRC, and DARPA panels. 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 groundbreaking research in program analysis and software defect detection is widely recognised by the research community, as well as being shipped in Microsoft products. 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 led groups developing the Orleans framework for cloud programming and computer hardware projects. Larus received a National Science Foundation Young Investigator award in1993 and became an ACM Fellow in 2006.