Buckeye Engineer wins Microsoft-sponsored student research competition

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Computer science and engineering PhD student Swarnendu Biswas recently earned first place in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)’s 2016 Student Research Competition.

Biswas
The ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), sponsored by Microsoft, offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research at well-known ACM sponsored and co-sponsored conferences before a panel of judges and attendees. The top three undergraduate and graduate winners at each SRC receive prizes of $500, $300, and $200, respectively, an award medal and a one-year complimentary ACM student membership with a subscription to ACM’s Digital Library.

Competition entrants exchange ideas with other students, judges and conference attendees, while gaining a new understanding of the practical applications of computer science scholarship.

Biswas, who is advised by Associate Professor Mike Bond, presented his work on a novel, efficient region conflict detection technique called Valor at the ACM PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation) 2015 Conference. Biswas and his Ohio State research collaborators have demonstrated Valor to be more effective and efficient than currently used tools in detecting a common source of concurrency bugs known as data races. A data race occurs when two accesses to the same memory location are conflicting. Data races can corrupt data and cause a computer to crash.

Thomas Degueule of the French National Institute for Computer Science (INRIA) earned second place and Christopher Theisen from North Carolina State University earned third place in the graduate student category.

Co-authored by Biswas, fellow PhD student Minjia Zhang, Bond and Carnegie Mellon University Professor Brandon Lucia, a paper titled "Valor: Efficient, Software-Only Region Conflict Exceptions" won the Distinguished Paper Award and Distinguished Artifact Award at the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) last October.