CS professor named Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher

Ondrej Lhotak, Associate Professor with the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science has been named an Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher by the Canadian Association of Computer Science. Lhotak joins Associate Professor Ian Goldberg (2010) and Professor Bin Ma (2009) in a growing list of distinguished faculty members who have won this researcher prize.

Lhotak’s research focuses on programming languages, compilers, and program analysis, with a specific focus on object-oriented languages. Program analysis has long been used to generate efficient code, and is increasingly being used in software engineering tools. These applications require precise and efficient program analyses. Increased modularity enabled by object-oriented languages makes interprocedural analysis necessary for precise results. As a result, he is working on making precise interprocedural analyses efficient enough to be practical.

In addition to his research, Lhotak coaches the University of Waterloo ACM teams. Once a member himself, the ACM teams compete in the Association for Computing Machinery Intercollegiate Programming Contests (ACM-ICPC). Lhotak led the Waterloo Black team to a bronze medal at the 2012 ACM-ICPC world finals.