Contact information

Current activities

I am a Medical Scholars Program (M.D./Ph.D.) student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I received my Ph.D. in computer science in May 2009. I am involved in research in computer architecture, focusing on architectural interaction with dynamic language runtimes. My advisor is Craig Zilles.

I work on IDEALS (the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship), a DSpace-based institutional repository for the University of Illinois.

I contribute to the development of several open-source projects including Jython.

Publications

• N. Riley. “Explicit Software Speculation for Dynamic Language Runtimes.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 2009. (PDF)
• N. Riley, C. Zilles. “Transactional Runtime Extensions for Dynamic Language Performance.” EPHAM, Apr. 2008. (PDF)
• N. Riley, C. Zilles. “Hardware Transactional Memory Support for Lightweight Dynamic Language Evolution.” OOPSLA 2006 Dynamic Languages Symposium, Oct. 2006. (PDF)
• N. Riley, C. Zilles. “Probabilistic Counter Updates for Predictor Hysteresis and Stratification.” HPCA-12, Feb. 2006. (PDF)
• N. Riley, C. Zilles. “Probabilistic Counter Updates for Predictor Hysteresis and Bias.” IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, Volume 4, Aug. 2005. (PDF)

Computers

I am primarily a Macintosh user, and have experience administering Debian GNU/Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD. I've programmed in many languages, starting with Applesoft BASIC and 6502 assembler when I was 5; I now write primarily in Objective-C, Java and Python with detours into some other more specialized languages where necessary.

Personal

My recreational interests include software design, bicycling, skiing, martial arts, and playing the violoncello.

My father lives in New York. Our Web site is rileys.us.