Benjamin C. Pierce
Henry Salvatori Professor
Computer and Information Science (CIS)
Honors and Awards: ACM Fellow, Honorary doctorate from Chalmers University, 2015 POPL most influential paper award, 2015, One of 15 most-acknowledged computer scientists (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) - 2005
Research Expertise: Programming Languages | Logic | Formal Methods
Benjamin's research focuses on foundational principles leading to more robust, cohesive, and secure software systems. He has worked on programming languages, static type systems, concurrent and distributed programming, synchronization technologies, and computer security, always with an eye to the fruitful interplay of theory and practice. Benjamin is the author of several books, including the widely used graduate text, Types and Programming Languages, and is the lead designer of the popular Unison file synchronizer.
Education:
PhD Computer Science 1991 - Carnegie Mellon University
Recent Publications 
- From C to interaction trees: Specifying, verifying, and testing a networked server, Koh, N. | Li, Y. | Li, Y. | Xia, L.-Y. | Beringer, L. | Honoré, W. | Mansky, W. | Pierce, B.C. | Zdancewic, S., CPP 2019 - Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Certified Programs and Proofs, Co-located with POPL 2019, 2019
- Position paper: the science of deep specification, Appel, A.W. | Beringer, L. | Chlipala, A. | Pierce, B.C. | Shao, Z. | Weirich, S. | Zdancewic, S., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 2017
- Combinators for bi-directional tree transformations a linguistic approach to the view update problem, Nathan Foster, J. | Greenwald, M.B. | Moore, J.T. | Pierce, B.C. | Schmitt, A., ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 2015
- Differential privacy: An economic method for choosing epsilon, Hsu, J. | Gaboardi, M. | Haeberlen, A. | Khanna, S. | Narayan, A. | Pierce, B.C. | Roth, A., Proceedings of the Computer Security Foundations Workshop, 2014
- Sensitivity analysis using type-based constraints, D'antoni, L. | Gaboardi, M. | Arias, E.J.G. | Haeberlen, A. | Pierce, B.C., Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, ICFP, 2013