Colloquium Details
Towards More Trustworthy and Efficient Systems
Speaker: Hugo Lefeuvre, University of British Columbia
Location: 60 Fifth Avenue 150
Date: March 11, 2026, 2 p.m.
Host: Prof. Mike Walfish
Synopsis:
Software usages grow much faster than computing hardware. Paradoxically, modern software systems make inefficient use of computing resources: decades of feature creep have made them too generic to perform well on any specific task. These decades of growth have also made systems fragile -- and frankly insecure, glued together from countless components of diverse origins, critical or confidential, buggy, risky, AI-generated, or otherwise untrustworthy.
This talk will take the audience on a journey at the intersection of systemsand security. I will give an overview of my past and present works applying isolation and specialization techniques to make systems more more trustworthy and more efficient (Unikraft, FlexOS, CHERIoT), demonstrating the shortcomings of these techniques and how to address them (CIVs, SoK), and getting these advances deployed to better the real world. I will conclude with a forward-looking perspective on my research and impact plans towards achieving this vision of more robust and efficient software systems.
Speaker Bio:
Hugo Lefeuvre is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia, where he researches topics at the intersection of systems and security. Earlier, he was a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester and a Microsoft PhD Research Fellow. His thesis was awarded the EuroSys Roger Needham PhD award and the honorable mention for the SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award.
Notes:
In-person attendance only available to those with active NYU ID cards.