Speech Title: Engineering Scalable Software Systems
Abstract: Ensuring the correctness of concurrent programs is notoriously difficult because the execution of such programs may take one of an exponentially large number of possible paths, each with a different result. My research has focused on addressing this problem for over three decades. We have developed a programming language paradigm, and by improved methods for ensuring the correctness of programs. Our work on defining and implementing Actor languages provides a foundation for complex, scalable software. Actor languages and frameworks have been widely adopted in industry to build large-scale applications such as Twitter, Halo game engine, and FaceBook chat servers. Testing concurrent programs is more efficient (and thus can be more thorough) if we can avoid the program executing redundant or irrelevant paths. I will describe how concolic testing and targeted test generation to improve testing of actor programs.

Biography: Dr. Gul Agha is Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, and CEO of Embedor Technologies. Agha is a Fellow of the ACM, and Fellow of the IEEE. He was a recepient of the 2019 ACM SigSoft Impact Paper Award. Dr. Agha served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Concurrency: Parallel, Distributed and Mobile Computing (1994-98), and of ACM Computing Surveys (2000-07). Dr. Agha is best known for his formalization of the Actor model which has been realized in industrial programming languages and frameworks such as Erlang, Scala/Akka, and Orleans. Agha and his research group developed Concolic Testing for programs with memory and concurrency. Concolic testing has been incorporated in industrial software testing tools such as KLEE, Microsoft SAGE, and S2E. Dr. Agha developed methods for Statistical Model Checking (SMC). SMC has been applied to biological systems and cyberphysical systems. Dr. Agha research also led to Euclidean model checking, a method to reason about the evolution of probability distributions. Other research contributions include methods to harness computational learning for program verification; logical methods for automated decentralized, predictive runtime verification of programs; and distributed algorithms for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Dr. Agha co-founded Embedor Technologies which is applying WSNs to continually monitor the structural health of bridges, buildings and railroad tracks. Embedor's technology was used to monitor the world largest Ferris wheel during construction.

Speech Title: A Reusable Approach to Software Development of Adaptive User Interfaces
Abstract: Adaptive user interfaces are an alternative to the traditional one-size-fits-all user interfaces. They have the ability to adapt their structures, appearances, and behavior to a variety of objectives, aiming to provide highly usable applications for people with different needs and in different contexts of use. Successful design and development of adaptive user interfaces are one of the major research directions in the areas of human computer interaction and software engineering. Navigation defines possible paths that users can take through an application to access certain information or functionality. Its efficiency has a great impact on user experience. Adaptive navigation guides users to their specific objectives by altering the normal way an application allows to navigate and therefore provides better user experience. Knowledge about activities that the user performs at runtime is crucial for adaptation decision making. It not only serves as a basis for evaluating relevance of the available information (such as user status, usage patterns, and context of use), but also facilitates reasoning about user needs. However, implementation of the user activity tracking capability often relies on intimate knowledge of the target application, which makes its development and maintenance rather difficult especially when the user interface and its adaptation logic evolve. We propose a reusable approach to the development of the user activity tracking capability. Vital to achieve its reusability is to use aspect-oriented instrumentation to capture user interface events and model-based analysis to identify user tasks from event traces. A proof-of-concept experiment shows that this approach provides a feasible solution to reusable software support for adaptive user interfaces at the task level.

Biography: Dr. Yonglei Tao is a professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at Grand Valley State University, Michigan, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Iowa. His research interests include tool support for usability evaluation, software engineering, and computer science education.

Speech Title: A Meta-method for Modeling Software-sensitive Integrated System
Based on Domain-specific Requirements
Abstract: The Architecture of an integrated system is the set of structures which comprise components or sub-systems, relations among them, and properties of them. Modeling architecture of an integrated system allow you to reason about the system and manage changes as the system evolves. Hence, research on Integrated System Architecture Modeling Methods (ISAMMs) is very important.
To address the challenges of deriving ISAMMs for specific domain requirements (e.g., defining what should be described using which views and with which Architecture Modeling Language (AML)), we propose a generic and systematic method for ISAMM designer to derive an ISAMM in a particular domain.
The proposed meta-method clearly defines the concepts related to domain-oriented system architecture modeling, and their relationships (e.g., modeling goals, conceptual models of domain-specific architecture, architecture viewpoints, etc.). It gives how the architecture modeling method is defined and what it encompasses, and provides a detailed process to guide the modeling method designer in a step-by-step manner.
To validate the applicability of our meta-method, we apply it to integrated hardware system domain and define a system architecture modeling method. The modeling method supports the design and analyze process of the integrated hardware system, which provides multiple views and concerns that are of interest to business people, designers, and managers at all levels of the system developing process. Through discussions with experts in integrated hardware system domain, they agree that the method is suitable for describing the architecture of a hardware device during its developing process.

Biogarphy: Dr. Li Zhang is full Professor, Vice Dean of Software College, director of Software Engineering Institute, at Beihang University. Member of Software Engineering Teaching Steering Committee of the Ministry of Education, National engineering education accreditation specialist, Vice chair of Education Committee in CCF( China Computer Federation), Committee member of Software Engineering in CCF. She received her B.Degree(1989), M.S. degree (1992) and Ph.D. degree (1996) from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University in China. She took part in and was responsible for several national scientific founded projects, nature science foundation of China(NSFC) supported projects, national high technology founded projects and National basic research program and cooperation project with America and Europe. She has established a research team working closely with software engineering, business process/system modeling, model driven engineering, visual modeling language and requirement engineering. She has published over 100 papers research papers in the field of software engineering, requirement engineering, model driving engineering, empirical software, and etc.