David Lie

Overview

I am a Professor in the Edward S. Rogers Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of Computer Science and the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. I am the Canada Research Chair in Secure and Reliable Systems (Tier 1), the Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, an Associate Director at the Data Sciences Institute at the Uniersity of Toronto, a Massey College Senior Fellow, and a Faculty Affiliate with the Vector Institute. I received my M.S. and Ph.D from Stanford University and my B.A.Sc from Engineering Science at the University of Toronto.

My research goal is to make computer systems more secure and trustworthy. With the large degree that computing has permeated our lives, from mobile smartphones to ubiquitous cloud computing, it is crucial that this infrastructure that we rely so heavily on be secure and reliable. We trust computer systems more than ever, meaning that they must be secure, transparent and protect our privacy. To achieve this goal, I take a variety of approaches to achieving this goal, including techniques using operating systems, computer architecture, formal verification and networking. I like to research and understand my ideas by building prototypes with my students. Over the years, we’ve built and open-sourced many software projects. More information about my research projects can be found on my Research page.

I previously held a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) from 2013-2018, and have been the recipient of a Connaught Global Challenge Award (2017), an Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation Early Researcher Award (ERA) (2008) and an SOSP 2003 best paper award for my work. I served as general chair for the ACM CCS 2018 conference and have served on numerous technical program committees of top conferences, such as IEEE S&P, Usenix Security, ACM CCS, NDSS, OSDI and ASPLOS. I served as associate editor for the IEEE Transcations on Cloud Computing from 2012-2016. I am a founding member of the IT3 Lab, a multidisciplinary lab working on improving transparency through technology and policy. I was a visiting research scientist at Google from 2016-2017 and served as Chief Security Architect at Enomaly, a Toronto-area startup, from 2009-2010, which was subsequently acquired by Virtustream. I was Associate Chair, Graduate Studies from 2012-2015.

I collaborate with top researchers internationally, as well as many of the leading technology companies, such as Google, VMware and Telus. I have been principle investigator on many competitive grants, totaling over $30M of funding.