Amit Levy, an expert in computer systems, has received the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, a top honor for early-career faculty.
The NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Levy, an assistant professor of computer science, leads the Praxis Lab and co-leads the Princeton SNS Group. His work focuses on building scalable computer systems that improve security and privacy while increasing developer flexibility.
The award provides $700,000 in funding over five years and will support Levy’s research related to system security vulnerabilities. One major source of security vulnerability is computer memory, the temporary storage that allows computers to run programs and access files efficiently. In traditional programming languages it is easy to inadvertently read or write memory in inconsistent ways, leading to security weaknesses. While new programming languages include safeguards for this problem, much of our current software relies on legacy systems that will take many years to update.
The goal of Levy’s research is to find strategies that will allow developers to use legacy software safely while they transition to newer programming languages. The project combines hardware-based and language-based techniques to encapsulate unsafe software libraries in such a way that guarantees errors in the library do not result in system vulnerabilities while still retaining speed and efficiency.
Levy joined the Princeton faculty in 2018. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington and a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University.