Research

I manage the Software Reliability Research group. My research interests are in how combinations of static/dynamic program analysis, model checking and theorem proving techniques can help improve the correctness and reliability of programs. See my papers for more details.

News

• POPL 2011: registration is open; advance program available! Read preparing for POPL 2011.
• Chapter 23 "Evidence-Based Failure Prediction" in new book Making Software (What Really Works, and Why We Believe It), with Nachi Nagappan
• Units 1-4 of Practical Parallel and Concurrent Programming courseware available
  • Read A Tool-based Approach to Teaching Parallel and Concurrent Programming, to appear in the 2010 Workshop on Curricula for Concurrency and Parallelism
• Static Driver Verifier Research Platform released
• Source code of CHESS (and Alpaca test framework) released on codeplex
• Source code of Randoop for .NET released

Papers

• SLAM2: Static Driver Verification with Under 4% False Alarms, T. Ball, E. Bounimova, R. Kumar and V. Levin, FMCAD 2010

• Efficient Reachability Analysis of Büchi Pushdown Systems for Hardware/Software Co-verification,  J. Li, F. Xie, T. Ball, V. Levin, CAV 2010
• Towards scalable modular checking of user-defined properties, T. Ball, B. Hackett, S. K. Lahiri, S. Qadeer, J. Vanegue, VSTTE 2010
• Preemption Sealing for Efficient Concurrency Testing, T. Ball, S. Burckhardt, K. Coons, M. Musuvathi, S. Qadeer, TACAS 2010

Talks 

• June 2010: Concurrency Testing with CHESS (Learning From eXperience 2010)
• Mar 2010: Preemption Sealing for Efficient Concurrency Testing [pdf] at Portland State University
• Oct 2009: The SMT "Big Bang": Applications of Z3 in Microsoft
• May 2009: Program Analysis 2.0 [pdf] at UIUC's UPCRC Research Seminar
• May 2009: A Brief History of Software [pdf], at Mining Software Repositories Working Conference

Awards

• IEEE Software article "Righting Software" was selected by Software's editorial and advisory boards as one of the 25th-Anniversary Top Picks for full-length, peer-reviewed articles.
• Exploiting Hardware Performance Counters with Flow and Context Sensitive Profiling won the Most Influential PLDI Paper Award, PLDI 2007.

Service

• General Chair, POPL 2011
• 2008 Marktoberdorf Summer School on "Engineering Methods and Tools for Software Safety and Security" (August '08)
• LASER Summer School on Software Engineering (2007)
• On the Design and Implementation of Static Analysis Tools at the University of Washington (2007)
• FLoC 2006 conference co-chair
• Program chair of PLDI 2006, program co-chair of CAV 2006
• Editorial Board, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
• Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (2002-2006)
• Secretary/treasurer, ACM SIGPLAN (2001-2002)
• Dagstuhl Seminar on Multi-version Program Analysis
• UW/MSR 2004 Summer Institute on Trends in Testing: Theory, Techniques and Tools
• SPIN'03
• UW/MSR 2001 Summer Institute on Specifying and Checking Properties of Software
• PLDI'01 Birds-of-feather session: Specifying and Checking Properties of Software

Program Committees

• 2008: India Software Engineering Conference
• 2006: VMCAI'06
• 2005: PDPAR'05, SAS'05, AADEBUG'05, CAV'05, ICSE '05 Experience Reports
• 2004: SAS'04, Metrics '04, TAV-WEB '04, POPL'04
• 2003: SPIN'03
• 2002: CAV'02, PLDI'02, TACAS'02, PASTE'02 (with FSE'02)
• 2001: Workshop on Software Model Checking, SPIN'01 , ICSE'01, SAINT'01
• 2000: FSE'00, ISSTA'00, TACAS'00
• 1999: DSL'99

History

I grew up in Summit, NJ, where my claim to fame was writing a game for the Apple II called Falcons in 1980 with high school pal Eric Varsanyi (see The Giant List of Classic Game Programmers). I attended Cornell University (B.A. 1987), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Ph.D. 1993). From 1993-1999, I was at Bell Labs in Naperville, IL in the (now defunct) Software Production Research Department. After 12 years as a Midwesterner, I had had enough. Now I live in Mercer Island, WA. I have sung in various Unitarian Universalist choirs, play e-bass (mainly jazz, blues, some rock 'n roll) and piano.  I now play in a band called the "The Middle Third".

The "Thomas Ball" Collection

• Tomball, TX
• Tom Ball at Sun Microsystems

• E-mail \com\microsoft\tball
• Office: (425) 703-8591
• Fax: (425) 936-7329
• Mail: One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052