Yang Chen

Welcome to my homepage! I graduated with a Ph.D from The University of Utah in 2014. My advisor was Prof. John Regehr. I am broadly interested in compiler techniques, programming languages, and operating systems, with emphasis on the methodologies for hunting compiler bugs and improving system reliability.

Research Interests

• Compilers
• Operating Systems
• Programming Languages

Projects

I was involved in a couple of projects:


• A Microbenchmark for C: a tool for finding missed-optimization bugs in C compilers (preliminary results).


• Csmith: a random generator of C programs targeting compiler bugs.


• C-Reduce: a test case reducer for C/C++ programs.


• voltest: a tool for testing C compilers for the correct handling of volatile objects.

Past projects:

• Neutron: an extension of the TinyOS operating system that efficiently recovers from memory safety bugs.


• Safe TinyOS: a modified compilation toolchain, released as part of TinyOS 2.1, that uses the Deputy compiler to enforce type and memory safety at run time on motes.

Publications

• Alex Groce, Amin Alipour, Chaoqiang Zhang, Yang Chen, and John Regehr, Cause Reduction for Quick Testing ,
  In IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), Cleveland, Ohio, March 2014,
  ICST 2014 Best Paper Award
  [pdf]


• Alex Groce, Chaoqiang Zhang, Amin Alipour, Eric Eide, Yang Chen, and John Regehr, Help, Help, I'm Being Suppressed! The Significance of Suppressors in Software Testing ,
  In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2013), Pasadena, California, USA, November 2013,
  [pdf]


• Yang Chen, Alex Groce, Chaoqiang Zhang, Weng-Keen Wong, Xiaoli Fern, Eric Eide, and John Regehr, Taming Compiler Fuzzers ,
  In Proceedings of the 34th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2013), Seattle, WA, USA, June 2013,
  [pdf]


• Alex Groce, Chaoqiang Zhang, Eric Eide, Yang Chen, and John Regehr, Swarm Testing ,
  In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2012), Minneapolis, MN, USA, July 2012.
  [pdf]


• John Regehr, Yang Chen, Pascal Cuoq, Eric Eide, Chucky Ellison, and Xuejun Yang, Test-Case Reduction for C Compiler Bugs ,
  In Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2012), Beijing, China, June 2012.
  [pdf]


• Xuejun Yang, Yang Chen, Eric Eide, and John Regehr, Finding and Understanding Bugs in C Compilers ,
  In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2011), San Jose, CA, USA, June 2011.
  [pdf]


• Yang Chen, Omprakash Gnawali, Maria Kazandjieva, Philip Levis, and John Regehr, Surviving Sensor Network Software Faults ,
  In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2009), Big Sky, MT, USA, October 2009.
  [pdf]


• The TinyOS Alliance, TinyOS 2.1: Adding Threads and Memory Protection to TinyOS ,
  Poster in Proceedings of The 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys '08). Raleigh, NC, November 2008.
  [pdf]

Work Experience

• Interned at NVIDIA in the summer of 2011, supervised by Jaydeep Marathe and Vinod Grover.

Hobbies