Scott Stoller and Yanhong Annie Liu, Professors of Computer Science at Stony Brook University, recently received a 3-year grant of $776,974 from the U.S. Navy Office of Naval Research for their research project on Algorithm Diversity for Resilient Systems.  Stoller summarized the project as follows:

“In cyberspace, as in many other domains, diversity provides resilience and is a robust defense against attacks.  Many ways of varying computer programs have been proposed to produce diversity from a given initial program.”

“However, these techniques do not vary the core or essence of a program---the algorithms it embodies--- and therefore cannot achieve essential diversity.  Achieving essential diversity requires an algorithm design method that is both powerful and systematic: powerful, so that it is able to generate fundamentally different new algorithms, and systematic, so that it is able to best explore the large design space to ensure the desired resilience through diversity, while also ensuring algorithm correctness and efficiency.  This project aims to develop such a method.”

Stoller said that this project is a uniquely exciting research endeavor for Stony Brook.  “It is an entirely new dimension for systematic algorithm design, expanding our two decades of research on systematic program design and optimization,” he said.

Scott Stoller is a scholar whose research accomplishments in computer science have garnered global attention. Stoller leads many innovative research projects in the areas of distributed systems, fault-tolerance and security, software testing and verification, and program analysis and optimization. He received a B.A. in Physics, summa cum laude, from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Annie Liu’s primary research is in languages and algorithms, especially on systematic methods for design and optimizations and applications to database and distributed systems. Liu received her B.S. from Peking University, M.Eng. from Tsinghua University, and Ph.D. from Cornell University, all in Computer Science. She is the author of many publications, including her recent book, Systematic Program Design. She has taught in a wide range of Computer Science areas, in addition to leading many research initiatives.