main.h23.gif (4215 bytes) Fred B. Schneider
Professor
fbs@cs.cornell.edu
Ph.D. State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1978

 My research focuses on techniques to support construction of concurrent and distributed systems for high-integrity, mission-critical settings.

The TACOMA project — a collaboration involving Cornell and the University of Trømsoe (Norway) — is studying the use of mobile processes, or agents, for structuring distributed systems. The work at Cornell on Tacoma emphasizes fault tolerance and security. This past year, we developed a new class of security mechanisms that can be used for the kinds of security needed by mobile code. Our mechanisms are provably the most general security mechanisms that can be implemented, so they have utility far beyond Tacoma and mobile code. In addition, jointly with Robbert van Renesse and Lidong Zhou, work started on "Tacoma Too" (T2), an ML-based version of Tacoma, and CAN, a prototype active network that executes T2 agents. T2 CAN currently supports TCP/IP. We are now building on our security work to develop a security architecture for active networks.

I have also been heavily involved in developing approaches for assertional reasoning about systems, since this is one way to can gain confidence that a component satisfies its specification. My text On Concurrent Programming, published this spring, unifies approaches to assertional reasoning and development of concurrent and distributed programs. David Gries and I continue our work on first-order equational logics and the calculational-style of proof. Most recently, we embarked on a project to formulate a first-order logic that is well suited for use by engineering and computer science undergraduates.

Awards 

Professor-at-Large: University of Trømsoe, Trømsoe, Norway (1996 - 2001)

University Activities 

Member: Affirmative Action Committee, College of Engineering, Faculty Recruiting committee, Computer Science Department, Computing Facilities Committee, Computer Science Department, Space Committee, Computer Science Department

Professional Activities 

Editor-in-chief: Distributed Computing
Editor: Information Processing Letters, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, High Integrity Systems. Annals of Software Engineering, ACM Computing Surveys
Co-managing Editor: Texts and Monographs in Computer Science, Springer Verlag
Program Committee Member: 4th International School and Symposium Formal Techniques in Real Time and Fault Tolerant Systems, ACM SIGSOFT '96: Fourth Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
Steering committee: Center for High Integrity Software Systems Assurance (CHISSA), National Institute of Standards and Technology
Co-chairman, Steering committee: Information Systems Trustworthiness, Computer Science and Telecommunication Board, NRC, National Academy of Sciences
Chairman, ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award Committee.
Co-organizer: Dagstuhl Seminar on Mobile Agents, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, October 1997
Member: IFIP Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology), NSF Committee of Visitors, July 1996
Fellow: Association for Computing Machinery (1994)

Lectures 

Security for mobile agents and their hosts. SUNY Stony Brook, Stony Brook, Long Island, June 1997.
Following Art's footsteps. After dinner speech. Art Bernstein's 60th Birthday Celebration. SUNY Stony Brook, Stony Brook, Long Island, June 1997.
Speaking about all implementable security policies. University of Trømsoe, Trømsoe, Norway, May 1997.
Security in Tacoma too. University of Trømsoe, Trømsoe, Norway, May 1997.
Information systems trustworthiness. High Confidence Systems (HCS) Working Group. DARPA, Washington, DC. April 1997.
The mechanics of journal submission and review. University of Trømsoe, Trømsoe, Norway, January 1997.
(Mis)Adventures with AAS: my experiences. Distinguished lecture. Computer Science, Ohio State University. November 1996.
The agent integrity problem. Computer Science, Ohio State University. November 1996.
Cryptographic support for fault-tolerant distributed computing. Seventh ACM SIGOPS European Workshop "System Support for Worldwide Applications", Connemara, Ireland, September 1996.
Fault tolerance for agents. Invited lecture. Dartmouth Workshop on Transportable Agents. Dartmouth College, Hanover NH, September 1996.
The calculational approach to logic. Invited lecture. Symposium on Teaching Logic and Reasoning in an Illogical World. DIMACS, New Brunswick, New Jersey, July 1996.

 Publications 

On Concurrent Programming. Springer Verlag, NY, 473 pp., 1997.
Report on Dagstuhl seminar on time services, Schloss Dagstuhl, March 11-15, 1996. Real-Time Systems, 12:3, pp. 329-345, May 1997. (With D. Dolev, R. Reischuk, and H. R. Strong.)
Information Systems Trustworthiness – Interim Report. Computer Science and Telecommunications Board Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, NRC, April 1997.
New partnership with ACM. Editorial, Distributed Computing, 10:2, pp. 63, 1997.
Automated analysis of fault tolerance in distributed systems. Proceedings First ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Automated Analysis of Software, Rance Cleaveland and Daniel Jackson, eds., (Paris, France), pp. 33-44, January 1997. (With Scott Stoller.)
On traditions in Marktoberdorf. Deductive Program Design, M. Broy, ed., ASI Vol. F152. Springer Verlag, pp. 1-4, 1996.
Notes on proof outline logic. Deductive Program Design, M. Broy, ed., ASI Vol. F152, Springer Verlag, pp. 351-394, 1996.
Cryptographic support for fault-tolerant distributed computing. Proceedings Seventh ACM SIGOPS European Workshop "System Support for Worldwide Applications" (Connemara, Ireland), pp. 109-114, September 1996. (With Y. Minsky, R. van Renesse, and S. D. Stoller.)
Supporting broad internet access to TACOMA. Proceedings Seventh ACM SIGOPS European Workshop "System Support for Worldwide Applications" (Connemara, Ireland), pp. 55-58, September 1996. (With D. Johansen and R. van Renesse.)