Engler Recognized For Excellence in Software Quality Research

SAN FRANCISCO, May 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Coverity, Inc., the software integrity company, today announced that company co-founder Dawson Engler was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his groundbreaking research on automated program checking that finds defects in complex computer software.

In naming Dr. Engler to this award, ACM noted that, "Dawson Engler introduces and develops powerful techniques and tools for practical program analysis that automatically detect errors in code. These methods have now been widely used to check large, complex software systems, uncovering many hidden defects. Dr. Engler's grounded, insightful, and practical approach to automated program checking has served as an inspiration to several other efforts and tools for finding problems in complex software systems."

The Grace Murray Hopper Award is given to the outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution. This award is accompanied by a prize of $35,000, which is provided by Google. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or less at the time the qualifying contribution was made.

"On behalf of the research groups at Stanford and Coverity, it's an honor to accept the prestigious ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award," said Dawson Engler, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University and Coverity co-founder. "The field of effective error detection has exploded in the past decade, and it's my hope we can realize a similar magnitude of improvement in the next ten years. For too long, the pervasiveness of computation has led to the same story: Software is everywhere, but all software is prone to crashing, therefore everything is prone to crashing. I believe we are on the right trajectory to deliver a credible means of ending this costly storyline, so developers can finally focus on building software instead of firefighting failures."

Dr. Engler helped lead the creation of the technology behind Coverity's software analysis system at Stanford University with Coverity co-founders Ben Chelf, Andy Chou and Seth Hallem who continue to grow Coverity's precision source code analysis capabilities. Dr. Engler remains on faculty at Stanford and continues as an advisor to Coverity. Today, more than 600 customers rely on Coverity to ensure the integrity of their applications.

"The Grace Murray Hopper award is very impressive, particularly given the fact that previous winners include innovators such as Steve Wozniak, Don Knuth and Richard Stallman," said Seth Hallem, co-founder and CEO of Coverity. "Dawson remains an integral part of helping Coverity shape the technological underpinning of our software integrity strategy. On behalf of Coverity employees, customers and partners we congratulate him on his recognition."

About Coverity

Coverity (www.coverity.com), the software integrity company, is the trusted standard for companies that have a zero tolerance policy for software failures, problems, and security breaches. Coverity's award winning portfolio of software integrity products helps customers prevent software problems throughout the application lifecycle. Over 100,000 developers and 600 companies including ARM, Phillips, RIM, Rockwell Collins, Samsung and UBS rely on Coverity to help them ensure the delivery of superior software. Coverity is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco with offices in 6 countries.

Coverity and Coverity Prevent are trademarks of Coverity, Inc. All other company and product names are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Coverity, Inc.

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