Since 2015, the Amazon Research Award (ARA) has been presented to promote scientific projects in areas such as robotics, machine learning or security. Since then, the program has presented 300 awards to 120 universities in 20 countries. Prof. Dr. Eric Bodden, since 2016 Head of the Software Engineering Group at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute of the University of Paderborn and Director at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechatronics Design IEM, is one of the successful recipients of the award this year. With the Amazon Research Award, Eric Bodden will receive a research grant of $60,000. In addition to the financial support, Amazon also offers a scientific conference for the award winners, which is an interesting opportunity to exchange ideas and present their projects.
Eric Bodden is one of the leading experts in the field of secure software development and focuses on the development of high-precision tools for automatic program analysis. In recent years, the use of static code analysis has become increasingly widespread, especially in the detection of security vulnerabilities in software programs. In particular, when analyzing Java web applications, computing a complete and accurate call graph is a fundamental problem of such analyses. Modern web frameworks such as Spring, for example, call certain program parts automatically, which code analyses have to model accordingly in order to arrive at correct and precise results.
With his research, Bodden wants to optimize the quality of such call graphs for Java enterprise applications. His aim is to develop a tool chain that enriches static call graphs with dynamic information from the runtime and that can be integrated into existing code analyses. The approach will be tested on the basis of the open-source program analysis framework Soot, which is maintained at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute and is already in use at Amazon Web Services.
We sincerely congratulate Eric Bodden for this prestigious award!
