Lori A. Clarke

Professor Lori A. Clarke is a member of the Computer Science faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is an ACM Fellow, a member of the IEEE Publication Board, and an elected member of the Computing Research Association's Board of Directors. She is a former IEEE Distinguished Visitor, ACM National Lecturer, associate editor of ACM TOPLAS and IEEE TSE, member of the CCR NSF advisory board, ACM SIGSOFT secretary/treasurer, vice-chair and chair, as well as a 1990 recipient of the University of Massachusetts Chancellor's Medal, and a 1993 recipient of a University Faculty Fellowship. She has written numerous papers, served on many program committees, and was program co-chair of the 14th International Conference on Software Engineering. She is general chair of the 2003 International Conference on Software Engineering. She has been a Principal Investigator on a number of NSF and ARPA/DARPA projects.

Dr. Clarke has worked in the area of software testing and analysis for many years. She was one of the primary developers of symbolic execution, a technique used to reason about the behavior of software systems and to select test data. With Richardson, she developed one of the first approaches for specification-based testing. With Podgurski, Richardson, and Zeil she showed how the more popular test coverage criteria relate to each other. This paper was cited, ten years after the conference, as one of the most influential papers of ICSE 8. This led to work with Thompson and Richardson that demonstrated how fault-based approaches fail to provide necessary fault detection conditions, thus revealing a major weakness in this approach. With Podgurski, she defined a general, language-independent model of program dependencies, which generalizes Weiser's work on program slicing. In the environments area Clarke, along with Wileden and Wolf, debunked the benefits of a nested program structure and then proposed an alternative component interaction model. With Tarr, she also developed one of the first database programming language, Pleiades . Recently her work has focused on analysis of concurrent systems. With Cobleigh, Dwyer, Naumovich and Osterweil, she has developed FLAVERS, a static analysis tool that uses data flow analysis techniques to verify user-specified properties. FLAVERS is an efficient technique that allows users to selectively improve the accuracy of the program model as needed to improve the accuracy of the results.