Lucille versus the little dog

Michael McDougall

Me in Florence E-mail:mmcdouga |at| saul.cis.upenn.edu

What I am

I work for GrammaTech in Ithaca, NY. My research there focuses on tools for finding and mitigating security flaws and other flaws in software. I'm leading one project on software visualization for large systems, and another on improving tools used by NASA for software quality.

In the past, I led GrammaTech's recruiting efforts and headed a project on security analysis for the semantic web.

I also contribute to other research and commercial projects.

Publications

Research Interests

Herring Cove Sunset
Generally I am interested software engineering and security issues, especially the application of formal methods to those issues. (There's a decent plain-english article about this field in an old Economist.)

My dissertation was on policy automata, a formal model of stateful access-control policies. I implemented a tool called Polaris that checks these policies, looking for problems like conflicts and redundancies. This work is part of the OpEm project. I was interviewed by the Daily Pennsylvanian (the local student paper) about this work.

Here are some specific projects I was involved in while in school:

Teaching

Other Work

Things I do that aren't really research:

History

Christmas down on the shore

Genetics

My brother can be seen here (he's the one on the bottom).

My in-laws run a decorating center in Halifax.

Internal Links

Oh no, I made a blog.

My cats, Ramona, Inez and Steve.

Have you seen the Happy Cow?

The Horseshoes and Handgrenades Home Page

A list of software tools I recommend.

How I put together an MP3 component for my stereo.

Pictures
 from Nova Scotia.

Big Sky, March 2008

Halifax from 38000 feet.

External Links

Herring Cove
Brian Eno's oblique strategies
Help for people who are stuck.
Desktop Wallpaper
Nice background images.