In Memoriam: Feng Chen

Aug 14 2009

Computer science PhD student Feng Chen died on August 8th due to complications from an undetected blood clot.

Feng conducted his research under Prof. Grigore Rosu in the Formal Systems Laboratory.  His research was dedicated to developing effective techniques and methodologies for building reliable and secure complex software systems.  His interests covered a wide range of areas, including software engineering, programming languages, formal methods, and algorithm design.

In an acknowledgement in Feng’s PhD thesis, Prof. Rosu wrote: “Both Feng and I started our academic lives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign seven years ago, in the fall of 2002.  Feng had very strong credentials even at that early stage in his career, having worked at the prestigious Bell Laboratories in Beijing and having published papers in top conferences, so I had no doubt that we would have a fruitful collaboration over the years to come. We have together founded and developed a research agenda in formal methods, software engineering and programming languages - an agenda that eventually led to the creation of the Formal Systems Laboratory (FSL).”

“Feng has not only been my dear student, but in time he has become an invaluable colleague and eventually a very good friend, one whose opinion I always asked when important decisions had to be taken in our group,” said Rosu.

Feng's seminal work in runtime verification, some of it included in this thesis, serves as a scientific foundation that challenged several research groups around the world. “His work on parametric trace slicing and monitoring turned out to lead to systems that can verify their own executions at runtime with a runtime overhead lower than 10%, which significantly outperformed existing similar systems,” said Rosu. “Also, his work on sliced causality and predictive runtime analysis has lead to systems whose predictive power exceeded by far that of other existing systems.”

Feng was widely published, and his research was presented at all of the major conferences in formal methods, software engineering, and programming languages.  He received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for his paper in the ASE 2008 conference, and was the recipient of the C.L. and Jane Liu Award in the department of computer science, an award given once per year to a most promising graduate student.

After his graduation, Feng had accepted a tenure-track position at Iowa State University.  In addition, Feng and Prof. Rosu had co-founded a start-up company, targeted at further developing and eventually commercializing the technologies initiated by Feng during his doctoral studies.

Feng is survived by his father Guofan Chen and his mother Yamei Wu, his brother Jun Chen, and his fianceé Gehui Zhang.

The department will hold a memorial for Feng at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, August 19th in room 1404 of the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science (201 N. Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL).

Contributions to the Feng Chen Memorial fund can be delivered to the department business office at the following address.  Please make checks payable to Feng Chen Memorial Fund. 
University of Illinois
Department of Computer Science
Attn:  Business Office, 2210
201 N. Goodwin Ave.
Urbana, IL  61801

Feng will be greatly missed by the entire computer science department.