Gabe Weaver Named Inaugural Dieckamp Fellow

Dr. Gabe Weaver received his PhD from Dartmouth in 2013. During his research career, Gabe has had stints at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and as a non-residential fellow at Harvard, where he designed an XML vocabulary to encode Ancient Greek Mathematical diagrams. He more recently worked as a research scientist in Illinois' Information Trust Institute.

For his dissertation at Dartmouth College, Gabe created eXtended Unix tools (XUTools) to process a broader class of languages in which security-policies are expressed in the language-theoretic sense. XUTools allows practitioners to extract, count, and compare files in terms of high-level language structures found in modern markup, programming, and configuration languages. Articles on XUTools have been featured in news outlets such as ComputerWorld, CIO Magazine, Communications of the ACM, and Slashdot.

The inspiration for XUTools came from the historical transmission of text as seen in Homer's Iliad.  Throughout the historical transmission of text, people have identified meaningful substrings of text and categorized them into groups such as sentences, pages, lines, function blocks, and books to name a few. Gabe's thesis interprets these useful structures as different context-free languages by which we can analyze text.  This research was done with a committee that included Dartmouth CS professors Sean Smith, Tom Cormen, Dan Rockmore, and Doug McIlroy.

As a Dieckamp fellow Gabe will remain at UIUC’s Information Trust Institute and focus on "designing better ways to assess the safety and security of cyber-physical systems." Gabe goes on to say, "The Dieckamp fellowship not only enables me to explore new theoretical approaches to evaluate cyber-physical systems’ security but to apply and evaluate such approaches in the context of critical infrastructure, which affect us on a daily basis,” 

For more information see -- http://iti.illinois.edu/news/illinois-names-inaugural-dieckamp-postdoctoral-fellow