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.
Speakers in 2021 to be announced soon......