Michael Hicks

Professor (2021-2022)

mwh@cs.umd.edu

5246 Iribe Center

(301) 405-2710

Michael Hicks is a Professor Emeritus (retired 2022) in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland. His research explores ways to make software more reliable and secure, oftentimes employing programming language-centric techniques, including domain-specific language design, type systems, program analysis, program transformation, and automated testing. He was the elected Chair of ACM SIGPLAN, the Association of Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Programming Languages, from 2015-2018. Topics of recent research include synergies between cryptography and programming languages; techniques for better random (fuzz) testing and probabilistic reasoning; and high-assurance tools and languages for quantum computing. For the last few years he has led efforts to use formal methods to develop proved-correct implementations of quantum programming tools, most notably including VOQC, the Verified Optimizer for Quantum Circuits. Michael Hicks was a QuICS Affiliate Fellow from 2021 to 2022. Hi is a Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services.

Publications

2023

I. Sweet, Darais, D., Heath, D., Harris, W., Estes, R., and Hicks, M., “Symphony: Expressive Secure Multiparty Computation with Coordination”, The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming, vol. 7, no. 3, 2023.

2021

K. Hietala, Rand, R., Hung, S. - H., Li, L., and Hicks, M., “Proving Quantum Programs Correct”, Schloss Dagstuhl, 2021.

L. Li, Voichick, F., Hietala, K., Peng, Y., Wu, X., and Hicks, M., “Verified Compilation of Quantum Oracles”, 2021.

K. Hietala, Rand, R., Hung, S. - H., Wu, X., and Hicks, M., “A Verified Optimizer for Quantum Circuits”, Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, vol. 5, no. POPL, 2021.

K. Hietala, Li, L., Gaur, A., Green, A., Rand, R., Wu, X., and Hicks, M., “Expanding the VOQC Toolkit”, in The Second International Workshop on Programming Languages for Quantum Computing (PLanQC 2021), 2021.

2019

K. Hietala, Rand, R., Hung, S. - H., Wu, X., and Hicks, M., “Verified Optimization in a Quantum Intermediate Representation”, 2019.

2018

S. - H. Hung, Hietala, K., Zhu, S., Ying, M., Hicks, M., and Wu, X., “Quantitative Robustness Analysis of Quantum Programs (Extended Version)”, Proc. ACM Program. Lang., vol. 3, no. POPL, p. Article 31, 2018.