Engineering Dean Andreas Cangellaris has announced that CS Professor Vikram Adve will serve as the interim head of the Department of Computer Science until a permanent replacement can be chosen for departing Department Head Rob A. Rutenbar.

Interim CS Department Head Vikram Adve

Adve has served as an associate department head for CS @ ILLINOIS since 2015. “Over the past few years, Vikram has been instrumental in charting CS’s course,” said Cangellaris. “His insights and leadership will be invaluable as CS continues to push the frontiers of innovation in research and education.”

Adve assumes his new duties on May 16, providing a period of overlap and transition with Rutenbar, who will join the University of Pittsburgh in July. “I’m honored to have been chosen and privileged to serve as interim head for CS,” said Adve. “Computer science is seeing explosive growth in student demand and enormous interest from industry, diverse academic disciplines, and even K-12 education. Illinois is one of the most prominent centers for all these CS-centric activities, and it is exciting to lead our remarkable faculty and students at this time.”

A 2015 University Scholar and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, Adve is a renowned expert in the development and use of compiler techniques to improve the performance, reliability, and security of computer systems.

Together with his PhD student Chris Lattner and Apple engineer Evan Cheng, Adve received the prestigious ACM Software System Award in 2012 for developing the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure. LLVM enables novel compilation capabilities for a wide range of languages. It is widely used in industry today—from mobile devices to supercomputers to data centers. Another of Adve’s PhD students, John Criswell, was a runner-up for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his work on using compilers for operating system security.

Adve's research group currently develops and explores the benefits of a novel system called ALLVM, which enables rich compiler techniques to be applied across all layers of software in a system.

Adve joined the Illinois faculty in 1999, after six years as a research scientist at Rice University. He holds doctoral and master’s degrees in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.