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.