By Shandana Mufti

Some individuals just know what they want their futures to look like. Middler Nick Rioux is one of those people. He entered Northeastern as a computer science major, knowing that somehow, he wanted to do research. And that’s exactly what he’s been doing since the second or third week of his first semester.

Luckily, he found himself in the perfect place to begin when his first classes started. His Fundamentals of Computer Science course was taught by Professor Amal Ahmed, who agreed to help Nick and a friend begin to explore the research world.

“We talked to her after class and she agreed to help us get involved,” Nick says. “We met with her every week. She would give us a paper to read and then we’d read it and go back and ask her questions.”

The summer after his freshman year, Nick, his friend and Ahmed received funding from Northeastern for an independent research project. Two years later, Nick continues to work with Ahmed, now as a research co-op investigating compiler correctness.

“At the top level, we’re looking at reliability of software,” Nick explains. If you look at how people build bridges and buildings and airplanes and things like that, it’s very important that those things don’t just break, fall down. We’re pretty good at it. For software, we’re not quite at the same level yet because software crashes, there’s bugs.”

The work Nick is doing looks at the reliability of compilers, which are tools used by programmers to translate code from programming languages into the 1s and 0s that a computer understands. “If there’s a problem in your compiler, it means every single person who used that for their program now has a bug in their program that they couldn’t have possibly known about,” he says.

Most compilers translate entire programs, but Nick’s research looks at small pieces of a program and how those can be broken down and compiled individually, but still work together at the end of the process. The formal verification of compilers that Nick is researching uses mathematical tools to prove compiler correctness.

This is Nick’s second co-op. His first was at HubSpot, where he worked as a software engineer co-op. Though that position wasn’t research-driven, Nick says he enjoyed the ability to see things he worked on come to life and be used in the real world. “Working on something and then seeing it come together and work…is really satisfying,” he says. “With a research co-op, it’s more about what you discover.”

About one month into his co-op with Ahmed, Nick is enamored with his work. “I just discovered this property that nobody in the history of human knowledge has ever known about before,” he says. “Yeah, it’s something small. It’s something that I can’t explain to my mom over dinner, but at the same time, it’s really cool.”

-As seen in the February 2016 E-Newsletter-