2026 Thomas Ball: Computer Science Researcher – H-Index, Publications & Awards

Discipline name	D-Index	World Ranking	Current World Ranking	National Ranking	Current National Ranking	Publications	Citations
Computer Science	69	1937	1875	980	942	199	24649

Research.com Recognitions

2011 - ACM Fellow For contributions to software analysis and defect detection.
1934 - Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Overview

Thomas Ball is affiliated with Microsoft in the United States and has contributed to the field of Computer Science through diverse research interests, including applications in teaching programming, embedded systems design, and computational drug discovery methods.

Their research spans several subfields of computer science such as Computer Science Applications, Hardware and Architecture, Computational Theory and Mathematics, Media Technology, and Pharmacology.

Main topics they have worked on include:

Teaching and Learning Programming
Embedded Systems Design Techniques
Experimental Learning in Engineering
Computational Drug Discovery Methods
Cholinesterase and Neurodegenerative Diseases
Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques

Thomas Ball has published in multiple venues, with the most frequent including:

Computer
Communications of the ACM
Toxicology Research
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Interaction Design and Children

Some notable papers include:

"Physical Computing: A Key Element of Modern Computer Science Education" (2020), Computer
"The BBC micro:bit" (2020), Communications of the ACM
"Beyond adverse outcome pathways: making toxicity predictions from event networks, SAR models, data and knowledge" (2020), Toxicology Research
"Plug-and-play Physical Computing with Jacdac" (2022), Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
"How families design and program games: a qualitative analysis of a 4-week online in-home study" (2022), Interaction Design and Children

Frequent coauthors include:

Steve Hodges
Joe Finney
James Devine
Peli de Halleux
Michał Moskal

Thomas Ball has received recognition in the form of awards such as:

ACM Fellow (2011) for contributions to software analysis and defect detection
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Best Publications

The SLAM project: debugging system software via static analysis

Thomas Ball;Sriram K. Rajamani

1281
Citations
Feedback-Directed Random Test Generation

Carlos Pacheco;Shuvendu K. Lahiri;Michael D. Ernst;Thomas Ball

1116
Citations
Mining metrics to predict component failures

Nachiappan Nagappan;Thomas Ball;Andreas Zeller

1091
Citations
Automatic predicate abstraction of C programs

Thomas Ball;Rupak Majumdar;Todd Millstein;Sriram K. Rajamani

1081
Citations
Use of relative code churn measures to predict system defect density

Nachiappan Nagappan;Thomas Ball

1037
Citations
Efficient path profiling

Thomas Ball;James R. Larus

946
Citations
Automatically validating temporal safety properties of interfaces

Thomas Ball;Sriram K. Rajamani

866
Citations
Optimally profiling and tracing programs

Thomas Ball;James R. Larus

799
Citations
Finding and reproducing Heisenbugs in concurrent programs

Madanlal Musuvathi;Shaz Qadeer;Thomas Ball;Gerard Basler

704
Citations
Identifying changes in on-line data repositories

Thomas J. Ball;Frederick Douglis

685
Citations
Exploiting hardware performance counters with flow and context sensitive profiling

Glenn Ammons;Thomas Ball;James R. Larus

666
Citations
Software visualization in the large

T. Ball;S.G. Eick

645
Citations
Bebop: A Symbolic Model Checker for Boolean Programs

Thomas Ball;Sriram K. Rajamani

539
Citations
Thorough static analysis of device drivers

Thomas Ball;Ella Bounimova;Byron Cook;Vladimir Levin

535
Citations
Branch prediction for free

Thomas Ball;James R. Larus

454
Citations
Boolean and Cartesian Abstraction for Model Checking C Programs

Thomas Ball;Andreas Podelski;Sriram K. Rajamani

453
Citations
SLAM and Static Driver Verifier: Technology Transfer of Formal Methods inside Microsoft

Thomas Ball;Byron Cook;Vladimir Levin;Sriram K. Rajamani

436
Citations
From symptom to cause: localizing errors in counterexample traces

Thomas Ball;Mayur Naik;Sriram K. Rajamani

436
Citations
The SLAM Toolkit

Thomas Ball;Sriram K. Rajamani

412
Citations
Automatic predicate abstraction of C programs

Unknown

50
Citations
Optimally Profiling and Tracing

Thomas Ball;James R. Larus

16
Citations

Frequent Co-Authors

Sriram K. Rajamani Microsoft (United States)

Michael Benedikt University of Oxford

James R. Larus École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Shuvendu K. Lahiri Microsoft (United States)

Nachiappan Nagappan Facebook (United States)

Fred Douglis Peraton Labs

Madanlal Musuvathi Microsoft (United States)

Byron Cook Amazon (United States)

Shaz Qadeer Microsoft (United States)

Orna Kupferman Hebrew University of Jerusalem

External Links

Personal website of Thomas Ball Google Scholar page

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