Education Research News & Events About SCS Partnerships Departments Give CMU's WebAssembly Research Center Continues to Expand

The WebAssembly Research Center (WRC) at Carnegie Mellon University continues to expand, with Bosch joining as a new member and founding member Shopify increasing its participation.

"The WebAssembly Research Center sees WebAssembly as a key foundational technology for bringing security and portability to many domains. WebAssembly has already delivered new, powerful capabilities to the web and is continually expanding beyond the browser," said Ben Titzer, WRC director and a principal researcher in the Software and Societal Systems Department in CMU's School of Computer Science. 

"Bringing Bosch on board as a new partner allows us to collaborate in applying WebAssembly to cutting-edge cyber-physical systems," he continued. "Deepening our relationship with Shopify allows the center to focus on concrete, real-world problems and do research that delivers value directly to developers. Together with our partners, we can advance the overall mission to make WebAssembly tomorrow's universal execution platform."

Bosch, a global technology and services supplier in the mobility, industrial technology, consumer goods, and energy and building technology sectors, uses its expertise in sensor technology, software, connectivity and AI to create sustainable, user-friendly products that improve customers' quality of life. The company opened its Bosch Research and Technology Center in Pittsburgh in 1999 and has developed a strong relationship with CMU.

The WRC's expertise in WebAssembly's (Wasm) formal specification and the center's impartial approach to interfaces appealed to Bosch. The company is interested in collaborating to better understand how Wasm's formal specifications can support real-world safety and timing guarantees.

"We believe that WebAssembly has the potential to fundamentally change how we program embedded systems. As such, we're excited to collaborate with the experts at the WRC to define the programming models and tooling to make these changes a reality," said Emily Ruppel, a research scientist at Bosch Research and Technology Center.

Bosch becomes the fifth WRC member.

Shopify, a global commerce company that partners with the WRC to use Wasm for its Shopify Functions feature, was part of the center when it launched in 2023. Shopify Functions allows developers to customize the backend logic of Shopify in many languages that target WebAssembly, including JavaScript and Rust.

After a successful first year, Shopify has decided to increase its WRC participation.

"With WebAssembly, we can execute untrusted code on premise without sacrificing performance, security and flexibility," said Erin Ren, a development manager at Shopify. "We are excited to elevate our WRC sponsorship in 2024.  Our continued collaboration will focus on improving the performance of Wasm code execution, especially for Shopify Function's JS Wasm modules. We believe this is a great opportunity advancing the WebAssembly ecosystem to tackle real-world challenges on a large scale." 

CMU launched the WRC to increase the uptake of research around WebAssembly by building research infrastructure and developing academic instruction, projects and programs to train the next generation of specialists. The center was the first to unite researchers from across CMU, other institutions and industry to explore how the platform is used now and how it could be used in the future. The center is also the first devoted exclusively to WebAssembly.

Learn more about the WRC, including how to join, on the center's website.