Saman Amarasinghe

Saman Amarasinghe is the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he leads the Commit compiler group. Under his leadership, the Commit group has developed a wide range of innovative programming languages and compilers, including StreamIt, StreamJIT, PetaBricks, Halide, TACO, Finch, SySTeC, GraphIt, Simit, MILK, Cimple, BioStream, NetBlocks, BREeze, CoLa, Shim, AskIt, and Seq. Additionally, the group has created compiler and runtime frameworks such as DynamoRIO, Helium, Tiramisu, Codon, BuildIt, and D2X as well as tools for vectorization like Superword Level Parallelism (SLP), goSLP, and VeGen. Saman’s team also developed Ithemal, a machine-learning-based performance predictor, Program Shepherding to protect programs from external attacks, the OpenTuner extendable autotuner, and the Kendo deterministic execution system. He was also co-leader of the Raw architecture project. Outside academia, Saman has co-founded several companies, including Determina, Lanka Internet Services Ltd., Venti Technologies, DataCebo, and Exaloop. He earned his BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Cornell University in 1988, and his MSEE and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1990 and 1997, respectively. He is also a Fellow of the ACM.