Daniel Weise, PhD

1980 Hertz Fellow
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Daniel Weise is affiliate faculty at the University of Washington where he conducts research in computational biology.

His research focus is computational evolution, which uses simulations of populations of digital organisms to investigate the rise of novelty and complexity during evolution. Dr. Weise has been with U.W. since 9/04.

From 1992 to 2004 Dr. Weise was a senior researcher at Microsoft Research working on compiler technology and programming language technology. He was among the first to realize that compiler technologies, which deduced deep properties of program codes, would be much more valuable making programmers more productive than their usual use of making programs run a few percent faster. As a result, the research group he led created compiler tools aimed at the development process. The major result was the invention of the compiler-as-bug-finder, and, more importantly, the invention of user programmable automatic bug detection. Dr. Weise also led the creation of usable technology for allowing programming to declare program invariants in their code that the automatic bug detectors can verify and exploit. All the major code bases in Microsoft, such as Windows and Office, contain thousands of additional invariants and annotations that are vital to automatically avoiding entire classes and sources of bugs.

From 1986 to 1992 Dr. Weise was on the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University. He performed research into partial evaluation, which is an optimization technique for mostly declarative programs. Dr. Weise has also served on program committees for conferences, published in conferences and journals, and serves on an editorial board.

Dr. Weise’s PhD and MS are from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a Fannie and John Hertz Fellow from 1980 to 1985. His dissertation was on the formal verification of VLSI circuits.

Graduate Studies

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Computer Science
Formal Multilevel Hierarchical Verification of Synchronous MOS VLSI Circuits

Undergraduate Studies

University of California, Los Angeles