Steve Blackburn

Steve Blackburn is a Professor of Computer Science at the Australian National University. His research focuses on programming language implementation and performance analysis, with particular interests in garbage collection, just‑in‑time compilation, and computer architecture. He leads the DaCapo benchmark project and the MMTk memory management framework, and is a Fellow of the ACM.

Professor ACM Fellow

Research interests: programming language implementation, garbage collection, just-in-time compilation, computer architecture, operating systems, security, memory management frameworks (MMTk), benchmark suites (DaCapo), performance analysis, language runtimes, software engineering of high‑performance language runtimes

Steve Blackburn is a Research Scientist at Google and Professor of Computer Science at Australian National University. His research focuses on Programming Languages, with an emphasis on garbage collection, performance optimization, and benchmarking. Blackburn's work explores the intersection of language design, runtime systems, and hardware, aiming to improve program locality, mutator performance, and memory management. His publications address challenges such as garbage collection overhead, memory efficiency, and the evaluation of modern programming paradigms. Blackburn has contributed to projects like the DaCapo benchmarks and the Jikes Research Virtual Machine, fostering open-source research communities in language and system development.