Software engineering and systems security research, creating techniques to automate improving system quality, reliability, privacy, and performance.
Professor Brun's research focuses on making it easier to build and deploy software systems. His research is centered around automation and software behavior. He develops techniques that automatically enforce behavior on systems, automatically mine behavioral models of software to help developers understand system behavior, and automatically repair systems to satisfy the behavioral requirements imposed on them. He works closely with developers to understand the challenges they face and to build tools to help them. He works closely with systems to understand where they go wrong and how to automate preventing that from happening. The long-term goal of this research is self-adaptive systems that self-monitor, self-manage, and self-correct their own behavior to achieve high-level goals in dynamic, constrained environments. Professor Brun's research is multidisciplinary, often combining advances in distributed systems, information theory, theoretical computer science, security, and machine learning. The research is highly collaborative and involves open-source development.
PhD, Computer Science, University of Southern California (2008); MS, Computer Science, University of Southern California (2006); MEng, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003); BS, Computer Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003); BS, Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003).
After spending 2009-2012 as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Professor Brun joined the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as an Assistant Professor in 2012.
Professor Brun received the US National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2015, a Google Faculty Research Award in 2015, an IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering Distinguished Reviewer Award in 2015, a Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovation Foundation Award in 2014, an IEEE TCSC Young Achiever in Scalable Computing Award in 2013, and an NSF CRA Postdoctoral Computing Innovation Fellowship in 2009. His work on speculative analysis was awarded an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering in 2011 and recognized as an IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering spotlight paper in 2013. His work on privacy in cloud computing was a finalist in the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Competition in 2008. Professor Brun regularly serves on program committees of premier conferences on software engineering. One of Professor Brun's passions is promoting science and technology to young and underrepresented future scientists; he serves as a judge at middle- and high-school science fairs and mentors undergraduates in research and in pursuing graduate careers.