Monica S. Lam 

Biography

Dr. Lam is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow.

Professor Lam's current research interest is to create effective and reliable AI assistants to accelerate the discovery of knowledge. Her OVAL lab has created numerous open-source LLM-based tools used by consumers, historians, and journalists in their work; currently, she is focusing on research assistants that can discover new insights for biomedicine and other technical areas.

Professor Lam and her students have created the first quantifiably factual and engaging conversational agent, which has won the Best Research of the Year Award from Wikimedia Foundation; pioneered deep research agent called STORM that has been used by about a million users; developed the best-performing agent for retrieving knowledge from hybrid sources, including databases, knowledge graphs, and free-text, currently deployed at Wikimedia; created an agent framework that produces fluent task-oriented agents that do not hallucinate.

Prof. Lam is also an expert in compilers for high-performance machines. Her pioneering work of affine partitioning provides a unifying theory to the field of loop transformations for parallelism and locality. Her software pipelining algorithm is used in commercial systems for instruction level parallelism. Her research team created the first, widely adopted research compiler, SUIF. She is a co-author of the classic compiler textbook, popularly known as the “dragon book”. She was on the founding team of Tensilica, now a part of Cadence.

She received an NSF Young Investigator award in 1992. She was the author of two of the papers in "20 Years of PLDI--a Selection (1979-1999)", and one paper in the "25 Years of the International Symposia on Computer Architecture". She received the ACM Most Influential Programming Language Design and Implementation Paper Award in 2001, an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award in 2002, the ACM Programming Language Design and Implementation Best Paper Award in 2004, the ACM SIGARCH/SIGPLAN/SIGOPS ASPLOS Influential Paper Awards in two consecutive years, 2021 and 2022.

Professor Lam received the University of British Columbia Computer Science 50th Anniversary Research Award in 2018. Her decentralized, privacy-preserving Almond virtual assistant received Popular Science's Best of What's New Award in Security in 2019. Her research on eliminating Large Language Model hallucination, by grounding in Wikipedia, received a Wikimedia Foundation's Research of the Year Award in 2024.

Research Interests

Current Research

Previous Research Projects

Current PhD Students

Ph.D. Graduates (Mathematics Genealogy Page)

Publications

Selected Publications of Previous Research Projects

1. Musubi: Disintermediated Interactive Social Feeds for Mobile Devices
   Ben Dodson, Ian Vo, T. J. Purtell, Aemon Cannon, and Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of the 21st International WWW Conference (WWW2012)
   Lyon, France, April 2012. (Finalist of Best Student Paper).
   
2. Email Clients as Decentralized Social Apps in Mr. Privacy
   Michael Fischer, T. J. Purtell, and Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of the 4th Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs 2011)
   Waterloo ON, Canada, July 2011.
   

3. SociaLite: An Efficient Graph Query Language Based on Datalog
   Jiwon Seo, Stephen Guo, and Monica S. Lam
   In IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 99, February 2015.
4. Distributed SociaLite: A Datalog-Based Language for Large-Scale Graph Analysis
   Jiwon Seo, Jongsoo Park, Jaeho Shin, and Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of 40th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Hangzhou, China, August 2013.

5. Historical Research Using Email Archives
   Sudheendra Hangal, Vihari Piratla, Chaiyasit Manovit, Peter Chan, Glynn Edwards, Monica S. Lam
   In CHI-2015 Case Studies: ACM Computer Human Interaction
   Seoul, Korea, April 2015.
6. Effect Of Phonemic Cuing On Recall Of Personally Relevant Names Derived From Email
   Allyson C. Rosen, Ankit Mathur, Monica S. Lam, Sudheendra Hangal
   Poster at the 2015 International Neuropsychological Society Annual Meeting
   Denver, CO, February 2015.
7. Personalized Memory Testing for Names Using Email Archives
   Sudheendra Hangal, Allyson C. Rosen, Ankit Mathur, Monica S. Lam
   In BrainKDD: International Workhop on Data Mining for Brain Science, in conjunction with ACM SIGKDD'14, New York City, August 2014.
8. Effective Browsing and Serendipitous Discovery with an Experience-Infused Browser
   Sudheendra Hangal, Abhinay Nagpal, and Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)
   Lisbon, Portugal, February 2012.
   
9. Friends, Romans, Countrymen: Lend me your URLs. Using Social Chatter to Personalize Web Search.
   Abhinay Nagpal, Sudheendra Hangal, Rifat Reza Joyee, and Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
   Seattle WA, February 2012.
   
10. MUSE: Reviving Memories Using Email Archives
    Sudheendra Hangal, Monica S. Lam, and Jeffrey Heer
    In Proceedings of the 24th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)
    Santa Barbara CA, October 2011.
    
11. An Algorithm and Analysis of Social Topologies from Email and Photo Tags
    T. J. Purtell, Diana MacLean, Seng Keat Teh, Sudheendra Hangal, Monica S. Lam, and Jeffrey Heer
    In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis
    Held in conjunction with the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
    San Diego, CA, August 2011.
    
12. Groups Without Tears: Mining Social Topologies from Email
    Diana MacLean, Sudheendra Hangal, Seng Keat Teh, Monica S. Lam, and Jeffrey Heer
    In Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), Palo Alto, CA, February 2011.
    

13. The Collective: A Cache-Based System Management Architecture
    R. Chandra, N. Zeldovich, C. P. Sapuntzakis and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the Second Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, May 2005.
14. The Interactive Performance of SLIM: A Stateless, Thin-Client Architecture
    B. K. Schmidt, M. S. Lam, and J. D. Northcutt
    In Proceedings of the Seventeenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, December 1999.
    Published as Operating Systems Review, 34(5):32-47.

15. Automatic Generation of XSS and SQL Injection Attacks with Goal-Directed Model Checking.
    Martin, Michael C., Lam, M. S.
    In Proceedings of the 17^th USENIX Security Symposium, (San Jose, CA, 30 July-1 August, 2008), pages 31-43.
16. Securing Web Applications Using Static and Dynamic Information Flow Tracking,
    M. S. Lam, M.C. Martin, V. B. Livshits, and J. Whaley,
    In ACM Sigplan 2008 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation, (Keynote address), January 2008.
17. Finding Application Errors and Security Flaws Using PQL: a Program Query Language.
    Michael Martin, V. Benjamin Livshits, and Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA '05), October 2005.
18. Finding Security Vulnerabilities in Java Applications Using Static Analysis
    V. Benjamin Livshits and Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the 14th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2005.
19. Static Detection of Leaks in Polymorphic Containers.
    David Heine and Monica S. Lam
    In Proceeding of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, (Shanghai, China, 20-28 May, 2006), pages 252-261.
20. Context-Sensitive Program Analysis as Database Queries
    Monica S. Lam, John Whaley, V. Benjamin Livshits, Michael C. Martin, Dzintars Avots, Michael Carbin and Christopher Unkel.
    In Proceedings of the 24th SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, June, 2005. (Invited Tutorial).
21. Cloning-Based Context-Sensitive Pointer Alias Analysis Using Binary Decision Diagrams
    John Whaley and Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2004 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June 2004.
    ACM Programming Language Design and Implementation Best Paper Award, 2004.
22. A Practical Flow-Sensitive and Context-Sensitive C and C++ Memory Leak Detector
    D. L. Heine and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June 2003.
23. Tracking Down Software Bugs Using Automatic Anomaly Detection
    S. Hangal and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering, May 2002.(gzip'ed postscript).

24. Interprocedural Parallelization Analysis in SUIF,
    M. W. Hall, S. P. Amarasinghe, B. R. Murphy, S.-W. Liao, and M. S. Lam,
    ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, July 2005, 27(4), pp. 662-731.
25. Blocking and Array Contraction Across Arbitrarily Nested Loops Using Affine Partitioning
    A. W. Lim, S.-W. Liao and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, June 2001.
26. An Affine Partitioning Algorithm to Maximize Parallelism and Minimize Communication
    A. W. Lim, G. I. Cheong and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGARCH International Conference on Supercomputing, June, 1999, pp. 228-237.
27. Maximizing Parallelism and Minimizing Synchronization with Affine Partitions
    A. W. Lim and M. S. Lam
    Parallel Computing, Vol. 24, Issue 3-4, May 1998, Pages 445-475. (PDF)
    (A preliminary version appeared as Maximizing Parallelism and Minimizing Synchronization with Affine Transform, in the Conference Record of the 24th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, January, 1997.)
28. Maximizing Multiprocessor Performance with the SUIF Compiler
    M. W. Hall, J. M. Anderson, S. P. Amarasinghe, B. R. Murphy, S.-W. Liao, E. Bugnion and M. S. Lam
    IEEE Computer, December 1996.
    (A special issue on multiprocessors).
29. Detecting Coarse-Grain Parallelism Using an Interprocedural Parallelizing Compiler (PostScript)
    M. W. Hall, S. P. Amarasinghe, B. R. Murphy, S. Liao, and M. S. Lam,
    In Proceedings of Supercomputing '95, December 1995.
30. Global Optimizations for Parallelism and Locality on Scalable Parallel Machines (PostScript)
    J. M. Anderson and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN'93 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June, 1993.
31. Design and Evaluation of a Compiler Algorithm for Prefetching ( PDF)
    T. C. Mowry, M. S. Lam and A. Gupta
    In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, October, 1992.
    ACM SIGARCH/SIGPLAN/SIGOPS ASPLOS Influential Paper Award, 2022.
32. A Data Locality Optimizing Algorithm
    M. E. Wolf and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN'91 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June 1991.
    ACM Most Influential PLDI Paper Award, 2001.
    Included in 20 Years of PLDI (1979-1999): A Selection, 2004. (A retrospective).
33. Software Pipelining: An Effective Scheduling Technique for VLIW Machines.
    M. Lam.
    In Proceedings of the SIGPLAN 88 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June 1988, pp. 318-328.
    Included in 20 Years of PLDI (1979-1999): A Selection, 2004. (A retrospective).

34. Limits of Control Flow on Parallelism (PostScript)
    M. S. Lam and R. P. Wilson
    In Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, May, 1992.
35. The Stanford DASH Multiprocessor
    D. Lenoski, J. Laudon, K. Gharachorloo, W.-D. Weber, A. Gupta, J. L. Hennessy, M. Horowitz, and M. S. Lam.
    IEEE Computer. 25, (3): 63-79, March, 1992.
36. The Cache Performance and Optimizations of Blocked Algorithms
    M. S. Lam, E. E. Rothberg and M. E. Wolf
    In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, April 1991.
    ACM SIGARCH/SIGPLAN/SIGOPS ASPLOS Influential Paper Award, 2021.
37. The Warp Computer: Architecture, Implementation and Performance.
    M. Annaratone, E. Arnould, T. Gross, H. T. Kung, M. Lam, and O. Menzilcioglu
    IEEE Transactions on Computers, December 1987, C-36, 12, pp. 1523-1538.
    (A preliminary version appeared as Warp Architecture and Implementation, which appeared in the Proceedings of the 13^th Annual Symposium on Computer Architecture, (Tokyo, Japan, 2-5 June 1986). pp. 346-356.
    Included in 25 Years of the International Symposia on Computer Architecture, 2008.)

• The Almond open-source and user-programmable virtual assistant project
• MobiSocial Computing Group Home Page
• The SUIF Research Group Home Page
• The Collective Research Group Home Page
• Curriculum Vitae