Thomas Wahl

Affiliate Associate Professor

  • Reliability of complex and mission-critical computing systems
  • PhD in computer science, University of Texas at Austin
  • MS in computer science, University of Texas at Austin

Thomas Wahl joined Northeastern University in 2011. He moved to Boston from Oxford University, where he was a research officer in the Computing Laboratory. Prior to Oxford, Wahl held a postdoctoral position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.

Wahl's research concerns the reliability and security of complex and mission-critical computing systems. Two domains notorious for their fragility are concurrency and numerical computing. With colleagues, Wahl has developed leading algorithms and techniques that permit the automated analysis of concurrent software such as multi-threaded or data-parallel programs using rigorous formal techniques, which are able to track down unintuitive and nearly untestable program bugs.

He has also investigated the fragility of floating-point arithmetic code when run on heterogeneous or custom-made embedded platforms, or when accelerated using aggressive compiler optimizations. He is also interested in the impact of compiler code transformations on security "guarantees" made in high-level program representations such as source code.

Wahl has co-authored numerous publications on the verification of software. He also regularly serves on the program committees of leading conferences in the field of formal methods, such as computer-aided verification.

Previous PhD Students

  • Konstantinos Athanasiou

  • Yijia Gu

  • Peizun Liu

  • Jaideep Ramachandran