Susan B. Horwitz

Susan Beth Horwitz (January 6, 1955 – June 11, 2014) was an American computer scientist noted for her research on programming languages and software engineering, and in particular on program slicing and dataflow-analysis.

Early life and education Horwitz was born in Berkeley California January 6, 1955 but spent her childhood in Syracuse New York. Horwitz received an A.B. magna cum laude in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in 1977, a M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1982 and a Ph.D in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1985. She died on June 11, 2014, aged 59, from stomach cancer. Horwitz was survived by her husband, Thomas Reps.

Career Horwitz made contributions to the software development industry. She developed an algorithm in 1995 that Microsoft introduced into its SLAM tool which detected the bugs that were causing about 85% of the crashes in Windows. She served as the WES-CS director from 2014–2014. This grant funding allowed creation of a collaboration between eight schools implementing peer-led learning (PLTLCS), including the University of Wisconsin–Madison with Horwitz, Duke University, Georgia Tech, Rutgers University, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Purdue University, Beloit College, and Loyola College. This consortium published a 2009 paper that demonstrated that active recruiting combined with peer-led team learning is an effective approach to attracting and retaining underrepresented students in an introductory Computer Science class.

Horwitz was noted for her leadership in promoting computing in high schools. She was a member of the Educational Testing Services Advanced Placement Computer Science Test Development Committee for ten years (1987–1997) including chairing the committee for five years (1992–1997) at a time when the programming language for the exam changed from Pascal to C++.

Awards

Notable papers Horwitz earned several awards for her research. Her 1988 paper "Interprocedural slicing using dependence graphs" (with T. Reps and D. Binkley) was selected as one of the 50 best papers to appear at the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) during the period 1979–99. Her paper "Demand interprocedural dataflow analysis" (with Thomas Reps and Mooly Sagiv) in SIGSOFT '95 was selected as one of the best papers at the conference invited for submission to ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 1995. The paper "Precise interprocedural dataflow analysis with applications to constant propagation" (with M. Saviv and T. Reps) in TAPSOFT '95 was selected as one of the best papers in the conference and invited for submission to Theoretical Computer Science 1995. Her paper "Reducing the Overhead of Dynamic Analysis" (with S. Yong) in 2002 at the Second Workshop on Runtime Verification was selected as one of the best papers at the workshop and invited for submission to a special issue of the journal Formal Methods in System Design. In 2011, she received an ACM SIGSOFT Retrospective Impact Paper Award (with T. Reps, M. Sagiv, and G. Rosay) for their paper "Speeding up slicing", which appeared at the SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) in 1994.

Awards NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1989) University of Wisconsin College of Letters and Science Distinguished Honors Faculty Award, 2011