Gabriel Weaver

Gabriel Weaver is a Research Scientist at the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During his research career, Weaver has served at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory and as a non-residential fellow at Harvard where he designed an XML vocabulary to encode Ancient Greek Mathematical Diagrams. Most recently Weaver was named the Inaugural Dieckamp Postdoctoral Fellow to explore new theoretical approaches to evaluate cyber-physical systems' security within the context of critical infrastructure. Research efforts to develop a Cyber-Physical Topology Language (CPTL) are coordinated with the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI) and other national laboratories including Idaho National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Weaver holds a Ph.D. from Dartmouth College, and a B.A. in Classics in Mathematics, with a minor in Computer Science from the College of the Holy Cross. He has been a long-time collaborator and contributor to concepts and code surrounding Canonical Text Services developed out of the Multitext of Homer Project at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies. For his dissertation at Dartmouth College, Weaver applied similar ideas to create eXtended Unix Tools (XUTools) to process a broader class of languages (in the language- theoretic sense) in which security policies are expressed. Throughout history, people have identified meaningful substrings of text and categorized them into groups for analysis such as sentences, pages, lines, function blocks, and books. Weaver's dissertation formalizes these structures via context-free languages by which practitioners can extract, count, and compare files in terms of high-level language structures. Articles on XUTools have been featured in news outlets such as ComputerWorld, CIO Magazine, Communications of the ACM, and Slashdot. During his career at UIUC, he has co-advised 5 Ph.D students with Professor William H. Sanders, Department Head of ECE. Two of these students, co-authors with Sanders and Weaver, recently received best paper awards Weaver at highly-competitive conferences in systems security and resilience: QEST 2015 and DSN 2016. PI Weaver has a long history of educational outreach and mentoring including serving as a Lead Instructor for a Dartmouth Security Camp for 10 teenage students, to serving as a Resident Assistant (RA) for a hall of 60 Freshmen in college, to designing and teaching curriculum to roughly 16 incarcerated students with various mental disorders and criminal history.

Presentations: