Michael Franz
Born
Michael Steffen Oliver Franz[1]

(1964-05-01) 1 May 1964[1]
Hamburg, Germany
Alma materETH Zurich, Switzerland
AwardsIEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2012); Humboldt Prize (2018); ACM Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award (2021)
Scientific career
ThesisCode Generation On-The-Fly: A Key to Portable Software[1]
Doctoral advisorNiklaus Wirth
Doctoral studentsAndreas Gal
Websitewww.michaelfranz.com

Michael Franz is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on just-in-time compilation and optimisation[2] and on artificial software diversity.[3] He is a Distinguished Professor[4] of Computer Science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (by courtesy) in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UCI, and Director of UCI's Secure Systems and Software Laboratory.[5][6]

He is a Fellow of the AAAS,[7] a Fellow of the ACM,[8][9] a Fellow of the IEEE,[10] a Fellow of the IFIP,[11] a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Achievement Award[2] and of a Humboldt Prize.[12][5][6] In 2021, Franz was awarded the ACM Charles P. "Chuck" Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award.[13][14]

Biography

Born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, Franz attended the Christianeum in Hamburg and the Gordonstoun School in Elgin, Scotland and eventually graduated from the Christianeum with an accelerated high school diploma ("vorgezogenes Abitur") ahead of the rest of his class.

After completing military service in Germany, Franz moved to Switzerland to begin studies of computer science at ETH Zurich, finishing his Diplom-Ingenieur degree in 1989. During his undergraduate years, he was President of ETH's Computer Science Students Association.[15]

Declining a Full Fulbright scholarship that would have funded doctoral studies in the United States, he stayed at ETH and began doctoral studies under the supervision of Turing Award Winner Niklaus Wirth, completing his Doctor of Technical Sciences degree in 1994.[16]

Following two further years at ETH Zurich as a Senior Research Associate and lecturer, he joined the University of California, Irvine as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in January 1996. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and Full Professor in 2006. Since 2007, he has held a second appointment in UCI's School of Engineering, as a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (by courtesy). In 2016, he was awarded the title Chancellor's Professor and in 2022, he was further elevated to the University of California's highest level of professorship by being awarded the title of a Distinguished Professor.[5][6][4]

Research

Franz's doctoral dissertation, entitled "Code Generation On-The-Fly: A Key To Portable Software"[17] proposed to make software portable among different target computer architectures by way of using on-the-fly compilation at load time from a semantic dictionary encoding, a compressed intermediate data structure. Two years later, the Java programming language and system were launched and took this idea mainstream, albeit using the term "just-in-time compilation" instead of the term "on-the-fly compilation" that Franz had used.

Franz was also one of the first academics to realise that JavaScript was going to be huge. At a time when most of the academic community was ignoring JavaScript and similar dynamic languages as "little scripting languages," Franz and his student Andreas Gal researched how one would best tackle the specific features of a dynamically typed language in a just-in-time compiler. The resulting technique, Trace Tree Compilation, is now covered by a U.S. Patent.[18] Franz took this idea to Brendan Eich, the inventor of JavaScript and Mozilla's CTO at the time, and a collaborative project between UCI and Mozilla was born that eventually culminated in the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine in Firefox.[19]

Franz has been one of the main drivers of the "Moving Target Defense" movement for cyber security. He has been pioneering compiler-generated software diversity as a defence mechanism against software attacks, inspired by biodiversity in nature.[20]

This project has attracted attention beyond academia, with coverage in the popular press ranging from as far as The Economist[3] to Wired Magazine.[21] Franz and some of his students hold a U.S. Patent on some of the underlying ideas.[22]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Franz, Michael (1994). Code Generation On-The-Fly: A Key to Portable Software (DScTech). ETH Zurich. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.20.1424. Docket 10497. Archived from the original on 6 July 2017. Retrieved 24 July 2021.
  2. 1 2 "IEEE Computer Society 2012 Technical Achievement Award". 13 April 2018.
  3. 1 2 "Divided we stand". The Economist. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 4 January 2016.
  4. 1 2 "Distinguished Professor – Academic Personnel". Retrieved 11 July 2023.
  5. 1 2 3 "Home Page of Professor Michael Franz, University of California, Irvine". ics.uci.edu. Archived from the original on 21 June 2013.
  6. 1 2 3 "Home Page of Professor Michael Franz, University of California, Irvine". michaelfranz.com. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
  7. ↑ "2019 Fellows". aaas.org. Retrieved 17 January 2020.
  8. ↑ "Michael S. Franz – Award Winner". awards.acm.org. Retrieved 4 January 2016.
  9. ↑ "ACM Fellows Named for Computing Innovations that Are Advancing Technology in the Digital Age—Association for Computing Machinery". acm.org. Archived from the original on 9 December 2015. Retrieved 4 January 2016.
  10. ↑ "IEEE 2016 Newly Elevated Fellows" (PDF). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
  11. ↑ "Awards". ifip.org. Retrieved 17 January 2020.
  12. ↑ "Professor Franz Honored With Humboldt Research Award". Retrieved 11 February 2018.
  13. ↑ "Michael Franz receives 2020 ACM Chuck Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award". www.acm.org. Retrieved 11 July 2023.
  14. ↑ "ACM Chuck Thacker Breakthrough Award Goes to Innovator Who Transformed Web Applications". www.acm.org. Retrieved 11 July 2023.
  15. ↑ "Hall of Fame – Verein der Informatik Studierenden der ETH Zürich". vis.ethz.ch. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
  16. ↑ "UC Irvine - Faculty Profile System - Michael Franz". www.faculty.uci.edu. Retrieved 8 May 2022.
  17. ↑ Franz, Michael (1 March 1994). Code-Generation On-the-Fly: A Key to Portable Software. Zürich: Verlag der Fachvereine Hochschulverlag AG an der ETH Zurich. ISBN 9783728121158.
  18. ↑ Dynamic incremental compiler and method, retrieved 11 January 2016
  19. ↑ "JavaScript:TraceMonkey – MozillaWiki". wiki.mozilla.org. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
  20. ↑ Jackson, Todd; Salamat, Babak; Homescu, Andrei; Manivannan, Karthikeyan; Wagner, Gregor; Gal, Andreas; Brunthaler, Stefan; Wimmer, Christian; Franz, Michael (2011), Jajodia, Sushil; Ghosh, Anup K.; Swarup, Vipin; Wang, Cliff (eds.), "Compiler-Generated Software Diversity", Moving Target Defense: Creating Asymmetric Uncertainty for Cyber Threats, Advances in Information Security, New York, NY: Springer, pp. 77–98, doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-0977-9_4, ISBN 978-1-4614-0977-9, retrieved 8 September 2021
  21. ↑ Arbesman, Samuel. "Software Clones: Genetic Variation and Technology". WIRED. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
  22. ↑ Multi-variant parallel program execution to detect malicious code injection, retrieved 11 January 2016
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