About


Emery Berger is a Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus of the UMass system. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Professor Berger has been a Visiting Scientist at Microsoft Research and at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) / Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). Professor Berger’s research spans programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance. He and his collaborators have created a number of influential software systems including Hoard, a fast and scalable memory manager that accelerates multithreaded applications (used by companies including British Telecom, Cisco, Crédit Suisse, Reuters, Royal Bank of Canada, SAP, and Tata, and on which the Mac OS X memory manager is based); DieHard, an error-avoiding memory manager that directly influenced the design of the Windows 7 Fault-Tolerant Heap; and DieHarder, a secure memory manager that was an inspiration for hardening changes made to the Windows 8 heap (see this map of the landscape of memory management research for an overview). He also created and maintains the widely-used CSrankings website.

His honors include a Microsoft Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Lilly Teaching Fellowship, the Distinguished Artifact Award for PLDI 2014, the Most Influential Paper Award at OOPSLA 2012, the Most Influential Paper Award at PLDI 2016, the ASPLOS 2019 Influential Paper Award, five CACM Research Highlights, a Google Research Award, a Microsoft SEIF Award, and Best Paper Awards at FAST, OOPSLA, and SOSP; he was named an ACM Fellow in 2019. Professor Berger served two terms as an elected member of the SIGPLAN Executive Committee; he served for a decade (2007-2017) as Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, was Program Chair for PLDI 2016, and served as co-Program Chair of ASPLOS 2021.


(Mastodon)
PLASMAProfessor Berger is a co-director of the PLASMA research lab, and a member of the UMass CS Security Group.

Recent talks

Selected publications

PLDI 2019Mesh: Compacting Memory Management for C/C++ Applications, with Bobby Powers, David Tench, and Andrew McGregor.
OOPSLA 2018ExceLint: automatically finding spreadsheet formula errors, with Dan Barowy and Ben Zorn.
PLDI 2018BLeak: Automatically Debugging Memory Leaks in Web Applications, with John Vilk.
CHI 2017VoxPL: Programming with the Wisdom of the Crowd, with Dan Barowy, Dan Goldstein and Sid Suri.
ASPLOS 2017Browsix: Bridging the Gap Between Unix and the Browser, with Bobby Powers and John Vilk.(browsix.org)
OOPSLA 2016Prioritized Garbage Collection: Explicit GC Support for Software Caches, with Diogenes Nunez and Sam Guyer.
ICSE 2016DoubleTake: Fast and Precise Error Detection via Evidence-Based Dynamic Analysis, with Tongping Liu and Charlie Curtsinger.
SOSP 2015Coz: Finding Code that Counts with Causal Profiling, with Charlie Curtsinger. Best Paper Award. (coz-profiler.org)
OOPSLA 2014CheckCell: Data Debugging for Spreadsheets, with Dan Barowy and Dimitar Gochev. Recipient of Microsoft Research SEIF Award. (checkcell.org)
OOPSLA 2014SurveyMan: Programming and Automatically Debugging Surveys, with Emma Tosch. Best Paper Award. (surveyman.org)
PLDI 2014Doppio: Breaking the Browser Language Barrier, with John Vilk.  Distinguished Artifact Award. (doppiojvm.org), nominated by SIGPLAN as an ACM Research Highlight. 
ASPLOS 2013Stabilizer: Statistically Sound Performance Evaluation, with Charlie Curtsinger. (stabilizer-tool.org)
OOPSLA 2012, CACM 2016AutoMan: A Platform for Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation, with Dan Barowy, Charlie Curtsinger, and Andrew McGregor. ACM Research Highlight. (automan-lang.org)
CACM 2012Software Needs Seatbelts and Airbags.
SOSP 2011Dthreads: Efficient and Deterministic Multithreading, with Tongping Liu and Charlie Curtsinger. (dthreads.org)
CCS 2010DieHarder: Securing the Heap, with Gene Novark. Inspiration for security enhancements in Windows 8.
OOPSLA 2009Grace: Safe Multithreaded Programming for C/C++, with Ting Yang, Tongping Liu, and Gene Novark. First fully deterministic runtime system.
PLDI 2007, CACM 2008Exterminator: Automatically Correcting Memory Errors with High Probability, with Gene Novark and Ben Zorn. ACM Research Highlight. First automatic bug fixing system.
SenSys 2007Eon: A Language and Runtime System for Perpetual Systems, with Jacob Sorber, Alex Kostadinov, Matt Brennan, Matt Garber, and Mark Corner. First energy-aware / approximate computing language.
FAST 2007, ACM TOS 2007TFS: A Transparent File System for Contributory Storage, with James Cipar & Mark Corner. Best Paper Award.
PLDI 2006DieHard: Probabilistic Memory Safety for Unsafe Languages, with Ben Zorn. Direct influence for the Windows 7 Fault Tolerant Heap. (diehard-software.org)
OOPSLA 2005Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management, with Matthew Hertz.
OOPSLA 2002Reconsidering Custom Memory Allocation with Ben Zorn & Kathryn McKinley. OOPSLA Most Influential Paper Award.
PLDI 2001Composing High-Performance Memory Allocators, with Kathryn McKinley & Ben Zorn. Introduced Heap Layers infrastructure.
ASPLOS 2000Hoard: A Scalable Memory Allocator for Multithreaded Applications, with Kathryn McKinley, Robert Blumofe, & Paul Wilson. First provably scalable memory allocator. Basis of the Mac OS X scalable memory allocator; widely used in industry. (hoard.org)

more publications here.

I am always recruiting stellar PL/systems students to join my research group. If you are applying to UMass, especially from overseas, please read this first.