Researcher receives second Google award in two years

Vijay Ganesh, an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, is the recipient of funding from the Google Research Awards program for his proposal entitled From Functional Regressions to Security Testing.

The Google "unrestricted gift" awards support the work of faculty members at top universities around the world. Ganesh is planning to use the funds that come with the award to hire master's and doctoral candidates to assist him with his research into computer security testing.  

Ganesh says he's honoured to receive the Google award. "Every year hundreds of faculty apply from all over the world. Only about 10 per cent are successful in receiving the award," he adds.

He received the same award in 2011 in the software engineering category when he was a scientist at MIT. That award was for "String SMT solvers for theories over strings and regular expressions." SMT solvers are computer programs that automatically solve certain kinds of mathematical formulas. They are useful in software testing, formal verification, program analysis and synthesis. The award was transferred to Waterloo Engineering when Ganesh joined the Faculty in September 2012.

Ganesh also recently received acceptance by the Scientific Committee of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation to participate in the first Heidelberg Laureate Forum, to be held this September in Heidelberg, Germany. Only 200 qualified young researchers are selected to take part in the forum from a pool of thousands of faculty members and postdoctoral students.