Believing that people have a right to govern themselves, in his retirement Dr. Daniel Weise has been enabling grass-roots political groups to more effectively lobby their state representatives and hold them accountable. This pivot from science to politics was cause the observations that (1) avoiding climate catastrophe is a political problem, not a technical one, and (2) our politics had been captured by industry and billionaires.
Dr. Weise still takes time to keep up with technology, especially in biotech and AI. He now has more hope that humans will win the evolutionary arms race with pathogenic bacteria.
From 1992 to 2004 Dr. Weise was a senior researcher at Microsoft Research working on compiler technology and programming language technology. He was among the first to realize that compiler technologies, which deduced deep properties of program codes, would be much more valuable making programmers more productive than their usual use of making programs run a few percent faster. As a result, the research group he led created compiler tools aimed at the development process. The major result was the invention of the compiler-as-bug-finder, and, more importantly, the invention of user programmable automatic bug detection. Dr. Weise also led the creation of usable technology for allowing programming to declare program invariants in their code that the automatic bug detectors can verify and exploit. When he left Microsoft, all the major code bases in Microsoft, such as Windows and Office, contained thousands of additional invariants and annotations that were vital to automatically avoiding entire classes and sources of bugs. [Twenty years later, in 2025, Microsoft finally figured out that coding in C/C++ was a bad idea and is now investing in moving their entire C/C++ codebase to Rust.]
From 1986 to 1992 Dr. Weise was on the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University. He performed research into partial evaluation, which is an optimization technique for mostly declarative programs. Dr. Weise has also served on program committees for conferences, published in conferences and journals, and serves on an editorial board.
Dr. Weise’s PhD and MS are from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a Fannie and John Hertz Fellow from 1980 to 1985. His dissertation was on the formal verification of VLSI circuits.
Dr. Weise doesn’t control whether the Hertz Foundation “improves” these biographies via LLMs. If you think of any of this reads weird, don’t blame him.
