The End of OOAnalyzer-ASP... For Now
I previously wrote about OOAnalyzer-ASP, an experimental reimagining of the OOAnalyzer tool using Answer Set Programming. I have bad news: I…
Edward J. Schwartz: Computer Science Researcher
Edward J. Schwartz: Computer Science Researcher
Latest posts
Benchmarking Quantized LLMs for Local Coding Agents Part 4: Investigating the Impact of Thinking on Qwen3.5-35B-A3B
In Part 1 and Part 2, I reported some peculiar behavior for quantized Qwen3.5-2B models. In Part 3, I reported results for a larger variant…
Benchmarking Quantized LLMs for Local Coding Agents Part 3: Investigating the Performance of Qwen3.5-35B-A3B (Take 2)
In Part 1 and Part 2, I reported some peculiar behavior for quantized Qwen3.5-2B models. In Part 3 Take 1, I reported early results for a…
Benchmarking Quantized LLMs for Local Coding Agents Part 3: Investigating the Performance of Qwen3.5-35B-A3B (Take 1)
This post contains a broken experiment in which thinking was inadvertently enabled but did not use sampling parameters intended for thinking…
Benchmarking Quantized LLMs for Local Coding Agents Part 2: Testing all instances of SWE-bench Verified
In Part 1, I introduced auto-bench, a tool for benchmarking quantized LLMs for local coding agents, and shared some results from a…
ASP: Towards the Next Generation OOAnalyzer
OOAnalyzer is one of my favorite projects for a few reasons. The underlying problem is deceptively hard. If you look closely enough, OO…
Self-hosted MCP Servers for Daily Life
Like many people, when I'm on the go and need to do something, I reach for an LLM assistant. In my case, that's Claude. Anthropic, OpenAI…
auto-bench: Benchmarking Quantized LLMs for Local Coding Agents
New open LLMs are released constantly and keep improving. Gemma 4 was recently claimed to be groundbreaking, but when I tried the quantized…
"Idioms: A Simple and Effective Framework for Turbo-Charging Local Neural Decompilation with Well-Defined Types" Accepted to NDSS 2026
I'm happy to announce that my student Luke Dramko's paper "Idioms: A Simple and Effective Framework for Turbo-Charging Local Neural…
Musings on Decompilation Artifacts
(Apologies in advance, this is probably going to be rambling.) I spend a lot of time looking at various research artifacts. Yesterday, I…
Alias Blocking in Ghidra's Decompiler
My colleague Cory Cohen recently asked me to take a look at some surprising behavior in Ghidra's decompiler. He had a decompiled function…
"Systematic Testing of C++ Abstraction Recovery Systems by Iterative Compiler Model Refinement" Published at SURE 2025
Systematic Testing of C++ Abstraction Recovery Systems by Iterative Compiler Model Refinement I'm excited to announce that our paper…
"Quantifying and Mitigating the Impact of Obfuscations on Machine-Learning-Based Decompilation Improvement" Published at DIMVA 2025
🎉 New Research Published at DIMVA 2025 I'm excited to announce that "Quantifying and Mitigating the Impact of Obfuscations on Machine…
"A Human Study of Automatically Generated Decompiler Annotations" Published at DSN 2025
🎉 New Research Published at DSN 2025 I'm excited to announce that "A Human Study of Automatically Generated Decompiler Annotations" has…
Re-compiling Decompiler Output
Many people seem to be unaware that decompilers have a decompilation export feature, which is particularly beneficial when you are trying to…
Notes: Neural Decompiler Artifacts
Can existing neural decompiler artifacts be used to run on a new example? Here are some notes on the current state of the art. I assign…
LangChain and Ollama Make Building Local Tool Calling Agents Easy. It's a Shame They Don't Work! (Part 2/?)
In Part 1, we showed that tool-calling agents built using open source LLMs and LangChain almost universally performed poorly. They…
A Personal Manifesto
Given the recent change in government here in the US, I've been thinking a lot about my personal beliefs and values. As part of this process…
Hello BQN! Goodbye APL and Uiua.
For the past several years, I've been using Advent of Code as an excuse to do some professional development and learn new languages. The…
LangChain and Ollama Make Building Local Tool Calling Agents Easy. It's a Shame They Don't Work! (Part 1/?)
One of the most exciting possibilities of AI and LLMs are agents: tools that allow LLMs to interact with various tools in order to solve…
BlueSky and EchoFeed
I recently signed up for BlueSky. I just learned of a new service, EchoFeed, that polls RSS feeds and posts the content to BlueSky (and…
Notes: Power washing mixture for vinyl
This page documents my experience with "pressure washing" my vinyl fence and siding. I have pressure washing in quotes, because it's SH or…
Notes: Profiling
At some point, I hope to create a Notes section on my website that will turn Markdown files into a list of notes. This is basically how the…
Dog on the Run
Fostering My wife and I started fostering rescue dogs mostly by accident. We adopted a Shih-tzu mix, who seemed completely relaxed when we…
Advanced Automation using Ansible and Dorothy
In my last post I talked about how I have been using Ansible for my new laptop configuration, and shared my configuration for notion. So far…
Creating a modern-ish, usable Linux desktop with notion
Sometime while I was in graduate school, I started using the notion window manager. (Actually, at the time, I think it was ion3.) Notion…
Initial Thoughts on Owning an Electric Vehicle
I'm a serial car leaser. This December, when my old lease was running out, there were not a lot of very appealing lease deals. Some of the…
In the thrilling world of ones and zeros...
I was playing around with ChatGPT and it came up with this gem: In the thrilling world of ones and zeros, where the mere thought of assembly…
Quick Thoughts: "Security must be a business enabler, not a hinderer."
I saw a quote in a recent ACM article that resonated with me: Security must be a business enabler, not a hinderer. The article is about…
On The Performance of Hashing for Similar Function Detection
Imagine that you reverse engineered a piece of malware in pain-staking detail, only to find that the malware author created a slightly…
Reflections on Advent of Code 2023
Hello, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I just completed Advent of Code 2023, and wanted to jot down a few reflections before I…
Click for Full Screen
I've been working on a blog post that has some interesting images in it. Unfortunately, my blog view is narrow, which makes it hard to see…
Debugging the Ghidra Decompiler
I'm trying to document a few things that I do infrequently enough that I tend to forget how to do them, and need to rediscover the process…
Mainline Kernels on Ubuntu Jammy
Sometimes it is necessary to use a bleeding edge Linux kernel such as to debug hardware issues. In this post, I'll discuss how to do this…
Pulse Secure, systemd-resolved and Chrome
Some days I hate computers. Today is one of those days. My work computer froze over the weekend (which is another long, frustrating story…
Is It a Function or an OO Method?
I've been feeling left behind by all the exciting news surrounding AI, so I've been quietly working on a project to get myself up to speed…
BLISTER Summit 2023
I've mentioned a few times that I'm an avid skier. I live in central Pennsylvania though, and so the skiing is not always the best, to say…
CPOSC 2023
My family and I had quite the day attending the 2023 Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference (CPOSC) yesterday at the Ware Center in…
Initial thoughts on Rust
Last December, I did most of Advent of Code in Rust, which I had never used before. You can find my solutions here. The Good Modern syntax…
"The Art, Science, and Engineering of Fuzzing: A Survey" receives IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 2021 Best Paper Award
Right before the holidays, I, along with my co-authors of the journal article The Art, Science, and Engineering of Fuzzing: A Survey…
Distinguished Papers
It's been an exciting year so far. I'm happy to announce that two papers I co-authored received awards. Congratulations to the students…
"A Generic Technique for Automatically Finding Defense-Aware Code Reuse Attacks" To Be Published at CCS20, Pre-publication Available
I'm happy to announce that a paper written with my colleagues, A Generic Technique for Automatically Finding Defense-Aware Code Reuse…
Research vs. Engineering
One of the aspects I like about my job as a researcher at SEI is that I split my time between being an academic researcher and a software…
The Rabbit Hole of Multi-line URLs
I'm a long time user of weechat. I don't really use IRC anymore, but I use it to connect to bitlbee for IMs, slack, and so on. I really…
'The Art, Science, and Engineering of Fuzzing: A Survey' Published in IEEE TSE and ICSE 2020
My colleagues and I wrote a survey paper on fuzzing entitled The Art, Science, and Engineering of Fuzzing: A Survey. Late last year this…
DIRE ASE 2019 Camera Ready Available
My colleagues and I finished the camera ready version of our DIRE paper on variable name recovery. Although there's no code released at this…
August 2019 Updates
Variable Recovery As far back as I can remember, one of the accepted dogmas of reverse engineering is that when a program is compiled, some…
Zermatt, Switzerland: My Thoughts and Tips
Many people don't know that in addition to my work with computers, I'm very passionate about exercise and fitness. I enjoy circuit training…
Theming Semantic UI React in GatsbyJS
Semantic UI comes with the ability to add themes, but this must be done at build time. Semantic UI is built using LESS, a CSS pre…
Welcome to my new blog!
Hi there. This is my first blog entry on my new website. This Christmas break, my wife and I decided to update our websites. Her website…