Greg Morrisett on Secure and Reliable Systems
Greg Morrisett is the Allen B. Cutting Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. He received his B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Richmond in 1989, and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in 1995. In 1996, he took a position at Cornell University, and in the 2003-04 academic year, he took a sabbatical and visited the Microsoft European Research Laboratory. In 2004, he moved to Harvard, where he has served as Associate Dean for Computer Science and Engineering, and where he currently heads the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society.
Morrisett has received a number of awards for his research on programming languages, type systems, and software security, including a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an IBM Faculty Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.
He served as Chief Editor for the Journal of Functional Programming and as an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems and Information Processing Letters. He currently serves on the editorial board for The Journal of the ACM and as co-editor-in-chief for the Research Highlights column of Communications of the ACM. In addition, Morrisett has served on the DARPA Information Science and Technology Study (ISAT) Group, the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Advisory Council, Microsoft Research’s Technical Advisory Board, and Microsoft’s Trusthworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board.
Luke Muehlhauser: One of the interesting projects in which you’re involved is SAFE, a DARPA-funded project “focused on a clean slate design for resilient and secure systems.” What is the motivation for this project, and in particular for its “clean slate” approach?