Faculty

William H. Sanders

William H. Sanders

Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering
Director, Information Trust Institute

Professor
451 Coordinated Science Lab, MC-228
1308 W. Main St.
Urbana, Illinois 61801
(217) 333-0345
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Ph.D., Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, 1988

Research Statement:
Dr. Sanders's research interests include performance/dependability evaluation, dependable computing, and reliable distributed systems. He has published more than 175 technical papers in these areas. He is a co-developer of three tools for assessing the performability of systems represented as stochastic activity networks: METASAN, UltraSAN, and Möbius. Möbius and UltraSAN have been distributed widely to industry and academia; more than 300 licenses for the tools have been issued to universities, companies, and NASA for evaluating the performance, dependability, security, and performability of a variety of systems. He is also a co-developer of the Loki distributed system fault injector and the AQuA/ITUA middlewares for providing dependability/security to distributed and networked applications. He is also currently the Director and PI of two large centers at Illinois, the NSF/DOE/DHS Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for Power (TCIP) Center, and the Boeing Trusted Software Center. In all these activities, he leads and conducts research to architect and validate systems that are intended to be trustworthy (secure, reliable, safe, and survivable).

Teaching Statement:
I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in computer engineering. Most recently, I taught ECE/CS 541, Computer System Analysis. ECE 541/CS 541 is a comprehensive introduction to methods for computer system and network analysis. It focuses on methods that are applicable to a wide range of systems and practical uses and implementations of these methods. Broadly speaking, the course is divided into three parts: analytic/numerical modeling, simulation, and measurement. Each of these three approaches to computer system and network analysis has important uses, and will be covered in detail. Using each of these methods, the course will address models for performance, dependability (reliability and availability), security (availability, integrity, confidentiality), survivability, and performability (combined performance/dependability/security) analysis.

Research Interests:

  • Dependability/Security Evaluation
  • Architecting Reliable and Secure Systems
  • Stochastic Modeling

Undergraduate Research Opportunities:
As Director of the Information Trust Institute, I coordinated (with other faculty and staff) the development of a significant summer intern program. The program paired promising undergraduate students from around the world with ITI faculty members who are doing research on information trust topics (including security, reliability, safety, privacy, survivability, and correctness) that are relevant to the students' interests. Many of the summer interns had previously been limited to classroom work, and were excited by their experiences attacking real-world research problems and interacting with professors on an informal, individual basis. Several students reported that their internships had encouraged them to pursue graduate studies, particularly at Illinois, even if they had not previously considered postgraduate work.

Faculty members also appreciated the program, since it not only provided direct support for their research efforts through the students' work, but also allowed them to build relationships with outstanding undergraduates, possibly leading to graduate work or other collaborations. In 2007, 18 students from around the U.S. and as far away as Serbia and India participated in the program. The internships, which are supported by state and federal funds, include stipends and, in some cases, an allocation for travel expenses. Interested undergraduate students in their second or third year at any university can apply for the program by following directions on the ITI web site (www.iti.uiuc.edu).

For more information:
Prof. Sanders's Homepage
Prof. Sanders's Research Group
Information Trust Institute, of which Prof. Sanders is Director

Honors, Recognition, and Outstanding Achievements for Teaching

  • Named on the University of Illinois’s Fall 2003 Incomplete List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.
  • Recipient of one of the 2002 Engineering Council Awards for Excellence in Advising, awarded to the top 10% of engineering advisors. (Selection is based on nominations from engineering students.)
  • Named on the University of Illinois’s Fall 2002 Incomplete List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.
  • Recipient of one of the 2000 Engineering Council Awards for Excellence in Advising, awarded to the top 10% of engineering advisors. (Selection is based on nominations from engineering students.)
  • Recipient of one of the 1998 Engineering Council Awards for Excellence in Advising, awarded to the top 10% of engineering advisors. (Selection is based on nominations from engineering students.)

Honors, Recognition, and Outstanding Achievements for Research

  • Keynote speaker at the Pacific Rim Dependable Computing Conference, "Probabilistic Quantification of Security," Melbourne, Australia, December 17-19, 2007.
  • Paper “Detecting and Exploiting Symmetry in Discrete-State Markov Models” selected as one of the best papers at the 12th Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC’06); expanded version published in IEEE Transactions on Reliability.
  • Paper “Designing Dependable Storage Solutions for Shared Application Environments” selected as one of the best papers at the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-2006); expanded version accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.
  • Paper “Barbarians in the Gate: An Experimental Validation of NIC-based Distributed Firewall Performance and Flood Tolerance” selected as one of the best papers at the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-2006); expanded version being considered for publication in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.
  • Keynote speaker at the Cyber Security and Information Infrastructure Research Workshop, "TCIP: Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for Power," Oak Ridge, Tennessee, May 14-15, 2007.
  • Keynote speaker at the Workshop on Recent Advances on Intrusion-Tolerant Systems (WRAITS 2007), "Automatic Recovery from Failures and Attacks Using Bounded Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes," Lisbon, Portugal, March 23, 2007.
  • Keynote speaker at the ReSIST (Resilience for Survivability in IST) 1st Open Workshop, "Probabilistic Validation of Computer System Security," March 21-22, 2007.
  • Named member of the Networking and Information Technology Technical Advisory Group (TAG) of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), 2006.
  • Named member of the TRUST Distinguished External Advisory Board, University of California at Berkeley, 2006.
  • NASA Tech Brief Award for NTR no 42352: “A Performability-Oriented Software Rejuvenation Framework for Distributed Applications,” 2006.
  • Named member of the Advisory Board for the European Union Integrated IRRIIS (Integrated Risk Reduction of Information-based Infrastructure Systems), 2006.
  • Keynote speaker at LADC'2005: 2nd Latin-American Symposium on Dependable Computing, Bahia, Brazil, October 25-28, 2005.
  • Named member of the Advisory Board for the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division (CSED) for Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2005.
  • Named member of the Motorola Research Visionary Board (RVB), 2005, re-invited 2007.
  • Keynote speaker at the Windber Research Institute Showcase for Biotechnology, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, August 15, 2005.
  • Named member of the University of Michigan EECS Department National Advisory Committee, 2004.
  • Keynote speaker at Petri Nets 2004: 25th International Conference on Application and Theory of Petri Nets, Bologna, Italy, June 21-25, 2004.
  • Named Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for “Outstanding contributions to the evaluation and design of dependable systems and networks,” January 2004.
  • Keynote speaker at the Workshop on Stochastic Petri Nets and Related Formalisms (ICALP 2003 Satellite Workshop), Eindhoven, The Netherlands, June 28-29, 2003.
  • Paper “Formal Specification and Verification of a Group Membership Protocol for an Intrusion-Tolerant Group Communication System” won the award as the Best Paper presented at the 2002 Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC 2002) Tsukuba, Japan, December 16-18, 2002.
  • Papers “The Möbius Modeling Tool” and “Möbius: Framework and Atomic Models” named as being among the best papers at the 9th International Workshop on Petri Nets and Performance Models, and then selected for publication (as a single paper) in an upcoming special issue of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
  • Named Fellow of the IEEE, for "Contributions to tools and techniques for performance and dependability evaluation of computer systems and networks" (Jan. 2000).
  • Keynote speaker at MASCOTS `99, the Seventh International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (Oct. 1999).
  • Keynote speaker at the 1999 International Workshop on Petri Nets and Performance Models (Sept. 1999).
  • Paper "On the Effectiveness of a Message-Driven Confidence-Driven Protocol for Guarded Software Upgrading" selected as one of the best papers at IEEE IPDS' 2000 (expanded version published in Performance Evaluation), 1999.
  • Paper "Measure-Adaptive State-Space Construction," selected as one of the best papers at IEEE IPDS '2000 (expanded version published in Performance Evaluation), 1999.
  • Paper "State-Space Support for Path-based Reward Variables," selected as one of the best papers at IEEE IPDS '98 (expanded version published in Performance Evaluation), 1998.
  • Paper "An Efficient Disk-based Tool for Solving Very Large Markov Models," selected as one of the best papers at the 9th International Conference on Modelling Techniques and Tools (expanded version published in Performance Evaluation), 1997.
  • Paper "'On-the-Fly' Solution Techniques for Stochastic Petri Nets and Extensions" selected as one of the best papers at IEEE PNPM-7 (expanded version published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering), 1997.
  • Paper "Algorithms for the Generation of State-Level Representations of Stochastic Activity Networks with General Reward Structures" selected as one of the best papers at IEEE PNPM-6 (expanded version published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering), 1995.
  • Recipient of Faculty Award, Digital Equipment Corporation, Incentives for Excellence, 1989, 1990, 1991. Twelve faculty members are selected nationally each year to receive this award. An individual can receive this award for a maximum of three years. ($75,000 cash prize, $105,000 in equipment)

Honors, Recognition, and Outstanding Achievements for Public Service

  • Elected member of the Board of Directors of Sigmetrics, serving 2005-2006.
  • Elected member of the Board of Directors, ACM Sigmetrics, serving 2001-2003.
  • Elected Vice Chair and later Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing. Served as Vice-Chair 2000, and as Chair 2001-2003.
  • Made Director of University of Illinois Motorola Center for High-Availability System Validation, established by Motorola Inc. in December 1999 with funding of $1.1 million dollars for a 3-year period.
  • Named Vice-Chairperson of IFIP Working Group on Dependable Computing, 1997.
  • Elected member of IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing, July 1992 (youngest member ever elected).