William W Pugh

Bill Pugh received a Ph.D. in Computer Science (with a minor in Acting) from Cornell University. He was a professor at the University of Maryland for 23.5 years, and in January 2012 became professor emeritus and starts a new adventure somewhere at the crossroads of software development and entrepreneurship. In addition to his continuing efforts on the FindBugs and Marmoset project, he is a LP at the venture fund fortify.vc a mentor at The Fort, a DC tech accelerator, and runs Ninja Monkey Coders, LLC, a software development company. Bill Pugh is a Packard Fellow, and invented Skip Lists, a randomized data structure that is widely taught in undergraduate data structure courses. He has also made research contributions in the fields of incremental computation, implementation of functional and object-oriented languages, the use of partial evaluation for hard real-time systems, in techniques for analyzing and transforming scientific codes for execution on supercomputers, and in a number of issues related to the Java programming language, including the development of JSR 133 - Java Memory Model and Thread Specification Revision. Prof. Pugh consulted for Google in 2000 - 2003 on research that resulted in US Patent 665 8423, on detecting duplicate and near-duplicate files. Prof. Pugh's current research focus is on developing tools to improve software productivity, reliability and education. Current research projects include FindBugs, a static analysis tool for Java, and Marmoset, an innovative framework for improving the learning and feedback cycle for student programming projects. Prof. Pugh has spoken at numerous developer conferences, including JavaOne, Goto/Jaoo in Aarhus, the Devoxx conference in Antwerp, and CodeMash. At JavaOne, he received six JavaOne RockStar awards, given to the speakers that receive the highest evaluations from attendees. Professor Pugh spent the 2008-2009 school year on sabbatical at Google.