My name is Tristan Ravitch. I am broadly interested in high-assurance systems, program analysis, and verification. I am currently an applied scientist in AWS Privacy Engineering.

Previously, I was a Principal Researcher at Galois where I worked on legacy systems understanding, assurance, and resilience. That work involved static analysis and automated verification, with a focus on applying these techniques to binaries. Some of the technical artifacts I have worked on include:

  • Decoders and semantics for PowerPC and ARM
  • Modeling of operating system behaviors
  • Multi-architecture binary rewriting
  • An implementation of the DTrace language for bare-metal machine code programs
  • Verifiers for safety properties of legacy programs

I got my PhD in Computer Science (studying Programming Languages) at the University of Wisconsin--Madison in 2013 working with Ben Liblit. My work used static analysis to improve promote language interoperability and enable safer reuse of legacy code. In particular, I analyzed C libraries to automatically generate idiomatic library bindings for high-level programming languages, with a focus on generating idiomatic interfaces that took advantage of high-level language features. My undergraduate degree was in Computer Science at North Carolina State University.