Gabriel Weaver

Ph.D., Computer Science, Dartmouth College, 2013

Gabriel Weaver is a Research Scientist at the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He is currently working to develop a Cyber-Physical Topology Language (CPTL) to communicate and analyze cyber-physical systems. CPTL builds upon the observation that researchers and practitioners — through network diagrams, documentation, and publications — communicate domain-specific languages that solve specific problems. The intent of CPTL is to help experiments be more readily reproduced and enable tools to operate upon a common language.  Just as Unix text-processing tools operate upon files and lines, so can CPTL-based tools operate upon higher-level language constructs currently used to describe cyber-physical systems.

While working on his doctoral thesis at Dartmouth College, he created eXtended Unix tools (XUTools) to process a broader class of languages in which security-policies are expressed in the language-theoretic sense. XUTools allows practitioners to extract, count, and compare files in terms of high-level language structures found in modern markup, programming, and configuration languages. UTools is already in demand by practitioners and articles on his research have been featured in news outlets such as ComputerWorld, CIO Magazine, Communications of the ACM, and Slashdot.

Throughout the historical transmission of text and diagram, people have identified meaningful substrings of text and categorized them into groups such as sentences, pages, lines, function blocks, and books to name a few. His thesis research interprets these useful structures as different context-free languages (or visual units) by which we can analyze text (or diagram). This research evolved from Gabriel’s previous work in the Classics, in which he worked with The Perseus Project at Tufts University, Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, to develop new ways to reference, retrieve, and analyze the historical transmission of text and diagram.