Naveen Kumar Department of Computer Science University of Pittsburgh 6404 Sennott Square Phone : +1 (412) 624-9129 Email : naveen AT cs.pitt.edu (Okay, this photo needs to be updated I do not look like this anymore)

Research

I am a graduate student currently pursuing my PhD. My dissertation focuses on source-level debugging of dynamically translated programs. This includes debugging programs that have been modified at run-time for purposes such as, dynamic optimization, dynamic instrumentation, binary translation and software security, among others. My research interests include run-time program modification for optimization, testing and analysis. This involves building tools for programmers that help them write and debug safer, reliable and efficient programs.

I work in the COPA group at the Department of Computer Science. I am involved in the continuous compilation (CoCo) project group in which I am currently investigating techniques to debug programs that are modified as they run. I have developed a debugger, called tdb, which allows source-level debugging of dynamically translated programs. Tdb is based on the gnu debugger gdb. I am also  involved in the ongoing development and maintenance of Strata [pdf] run-time infrastructure at the University of Pittsburgh. Strata is an infrastructure for developing software dynamic translators, and was developed by researchers at University of Virginia and University of Pittsburgh.

Publications

• Naveen Kumar and Ramesh Peri, “Transparent Debugging of Dynamically Instrumented Programs”, In proceedings of Workshop on Binary Instrumentation and Applications, Held in conjunction with the 14th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), 2005. [Abstract] [Paper]

• Naveen Kumar, Bruce Childers and Mary Lou Soffa, “Tdb: A Source Level Debugger for Dynamically Translated Programs”, In proceedings of the Sixth Int’l. Symposium on Automated And Analysis-Driven Debugging (AADEBUG), 2005. [Abstract] [Paper]

• Naveen Kumar, Bruce Childers and Mary Lou Soffa, “Low Overhead Program Monitoring and Profiling”, In proceedings of 6th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering (PASTE), 2005. [Abstract] [Paper]

• Naveen Kumar, Bruce Childers, Daniel Williams, Jack Davidson and Mary Lou Soffa, “Compile-Time Planning for Overhead Reduction in Software Dynamic Translation”, Int’l. Jounral on Parallel Programming (IJPP) Vol. 33, Nos. 2-3, p.p. 103-114, 2005. [Abstract] [Paper]

• Naveen Kumar, Jonathan Misurda, Bruce Childers and Mary Lou Soffa, “Instrumentation in Software Dynamic Translators for Self-Managed Systems”, ACM SIGSOFT Workshop on Self-Managing Systems (WOSS'04) during the ACM SIGSOFT Int’l. Symp. on Foundations of Software Engineering , 2004. [Abstract] [Paper]

• K. Scott, N. Kumar, B. Childers, J. Davidson, and M. L. Soffa, “Overhead reduction techniques for software dynamic translation”, invited paper, NSF Workshop on Next Generation Software, during the Int’l. Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), April 2004. [Abstract] [Paper]

• S. Zhou, N. Kumar and B. Childers, “Profile guided management of code partitions for embedded systems”, Design Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE), 2004. [Abstract] [Paper]

• N. Kumar and B. Childers, “Flexible instrumentation for software dynamic translation”, Workshop on Exploring the Trace Space for Dynamic Optimization Techniques (TRACES), during the ACM Int’l. Conference on Supercomputing (ICS), 2003. [Abstract] [Paper]

• K. Scott, N. Kumar, S. Veluswami, B. Childers, J.W. Davidson and M. L. Soffa: “Retargetable and Reconfigurable Software Dynamic Translation”, In proceedings of  the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO), 2003. [Abstract] [Paper]

• A.Tripathi, B.Sarker and N.Kumar. “A GA based Multiple Task Allocation Considering Load Constraints”, International Journal of High Speed Computing, Vol 11, Number4, December 2000. [Abstract ] [Paper]

• A.Tripathi, B.Sarker, N.Kumar and D.Vidyarthi. “Multiple Task Allocation  in a Distributed Computing System”, International Journal of Information and Computing Science, Vol 3, Number1, June 2000.

• N. Kumar, J. Misurda, B. Childers, and M. L. Soffa, “FIST: A framework for instrumentation in software dynamic translators”, Department of Computer Science, Technical Report TR-03-106, September 2003. [Abstract] [Paper]

Related Relevant Work from Other Researchers

• The Dynamo RIO project is geared towards run-time introspection of programs for security purposes.
• The walkabout project deals with binary translation.
• The Dynamo project at HP Labs inspired the development of Strata.
• Shade works in a similar way to the cache simulator I wrote with Strata (a part of the CGO-2003 paper above).
• Peter Kessler's design of the Fast Breakpoints is very relevant to my work on instrumentation techniques in Strata.

There are a lot of other related works and groups that can be found in the related work section of my papers.

I recently made a cartoon on a slashdot addict.

Check out my friend Gaurav Saraf's webpage at Rutgers

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