James Larus

James R. Larus is an American computer scientist specializing in programming languages, compilers, and computer architecture. He is professor emeritus at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where he was Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) from 2014 to 2021.

Before joining EPFL, Larus was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR) from 1998 to 2013. He was at one point the Director of Research and Strategy for Microsoft's eXtreme Computing Group (XCG) where he helped develop the Orleans cloud computing project. He was also one of the two co-leads on Microsoft's Singularity project.

Previously, Larus was an associate professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison in the Computer Science department.

Education

Larus graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts in applied mathematics.

He has written many papers One of his best known papers is his paper on efficient path profiling.

He is also a co-author of the book Transactional Memory, published in 2007 by Morgan & Claypool.

Larus also helped fund and lead the development of the Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-3T) in effort to provide contact tracing as a way to slow the COVID-19 pandemic.

Achievements

Larus was a Harvard College Scholar, a National Science Foundation Young Investigator, and is an ACM Fellow. He has also won numerous awards for his papers over the years.