McMahan - Top 3 ACM/IEEE Diss. Award
ECE PhD Joseph McMahan receives Outstanding Dissertation Award honorable mention from ACM SIGARCH/IEEE CS TCCA
Dr. McMahan received the recognition for his paper “The ZARF Architecture for Recursive Function” for introducing a novel approach to software verification and cross-stack hardware design for critical systems by rethinking instruction-set architectures from a mathematical perspective. He earned his PhD electrical and computer engineering in 2019 from UCSB, where he worked with Timothy Sherwood in the ArchLab. His PhD thesis was centered around a novel computer architecture, the Zarf Architecture for Recursive Functions (Zarf), which seeks to alleviate the high cost of performing low-level verification and analysis on software systems. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle working for the SAMPL Group under Luis Ceze. His research focuses on computer architecture and one or more of {security, formal methods, deep learning}. His PhD work also dealt heavily with formal analysis of architectural side-channels. He holds a B.A. in Physics from Princeton University.
The SIGARCH/TCCA Outstanding Dissertation award recognizes excellent thesis research by doctoral candidates in the field of computer architecture. Dissertations are reviewed for technical depth and significance of the research contribution, potential impact on computer architecture, and quality of presentation.
