Gernot Heiser
Gernot is Scientia (distinguished) Professor at UNSW Sydney and Chief Research Scientist at CSIRO's Data61. His research is on microkernels, operating systems for security- and safety-critical software and real-time systems. He has in the past made seminal contributions to operating-system level power and energy management. His microkernels were deployed on billions of end-user devices. He is a Fellow of the ACM, the IEEE and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE) and a recipient of the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award. He currently serves as Chairman of the seL4 Foundation.
Gernot has been a leader of microkernel research since the mid-'90s. Through his startup Open Kernel Labs his L4-embedded/OKL4 microkernel has been deployed on billions of Qualcomm mobile communication chips and the Secure Enclave of all recent iOS devices. He led the Trustworthy Systems team at NICTA in Sydney which produced the seL4 microkernel, the world's first operating system with a machine-checked correctness proof of its implementation, which triggered massive interest in formal verification of OS code, and led to the SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2019. As part of the DARPA HACMS Program, his team demonstrated the incremental cyber retrofit of legacy military systems, using seL4 to protect vulnerable autonomous systems from cyber attacks. His current focus is on extending security and safety guarantees from the microkernel to complete systems, principled prevention of information leakage through timing channels, and taking seL4 to large scale real-world deployment.