William L. Scherlis
Acting Chief Technology Officer

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Key Responsibilities

William L. Scherlis is acting chief technology officer of the SEI. He leads the SEI in identifying and responding to the research needs of sponsors, customers, and partners.

Professional Background

Scherlis is a professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is director of the Institute for Software Research (ISR) in the School of Computer Science and the founding director of the PhD Program in Software Engineering. His research relates to software assurance, software analysis, and assured safe concurrency.

For more than a decade, Scherlis has led the Fluid Project, which has focused on techniques and practices for scalable software assurance, leading to a family of tools for analysis-based verification, based primarily on sound and dynamic analysis. Some of the technologies have been applied to larger-scale systems, including Hadoop, Java system libraries including java.util.concurrent, and diverse proprietary systems such as app servers and simulation engines.

Scherlis was principal investigator for the Carnegie Mellon-NASA High Dependability Computing Project (HDCP), in which Carnegie Mellon led a collaboration with five universities to help NASA address long-term software dependability challenges.

Scherlis is involved in a number of activities related to technology and policy and recently testified before Congress on innovation and information technology and on roles for a federal CIO. He served at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for six years, departing as senior executive responsible for coordination of software research. While at DARPA he had responsibilities relating to research and strategy in software technology, computer security, the initiation of the high performance computing and communications program (HPCC, now NITRD), information infrastructure, and other topics.

Scherlis chaired the National Research Council (NRC) study committee on defense software producibility, which recently released its third and final report Critical Code: Software Producibility for Defense. He served multiple terms as a member of the DARPA Information Science and Technology Study (ISAT) Group. He chaired an NRC study on information technology, innovation, and e-government. He has led or participated in other national studies related to cybersecurity, crisis response, analyst information management, Ada, and health care informatics infrastructure.

He has been an advisor to major IT companies, is a founder of SureLogic and Panopto, and has served as program chair for a number of technical conferences, including the ACM Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) Symposium. He has more than 80 scientific publications. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a lifetime National Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scherlis earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and his PhD in computer science at Stanford University.