Plenary Speakers

John Mylopoulos, University of Toronto/Trento

Title: Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

Time: 9:30-10:30am on May 21
Location: McEwen Auditorium, Seymour Schulich Building

Abstract: The last ten years have seen the rise of a new paradigm for software development which rivals object-orientation and is founded on concepts such as those of agent, role, goal and (social) dependency. We review the history of ideas and research results for this new phase and sketch on-going research on the topic. Specifically, we discuss an agent-oriented software development methodology -- called Tropos -- that supports the development of software from early requirements to detailed design. The research reported is the result of collaborations with colleagues at the Universities of Toronto and Trento.

Short Bio: John Mylopoulos earned a PhD degree from Princeton University in 1970 and has been professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto since that year. His research interests include conceptual modelling, requirements engineering, data semantics and knowledge management. Mylopoulos is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Sciences). He has served as programme/general chair of international conferences in Artificial Intelligence, Databases and Software Engineering, including IJCAI (1991), Requirements Engineering (1997), and VLDB (2004). He was co-editor-in-chief of the Requirements Engineering Journal, published by Springer-Verlag (2000-07).

Since September 2005 Mylopoulos is distinguished professor (chiara fama) of Science at the University of Trento.

Jiawei Han, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Title: Exploring the Power of Links in Information Network Mining

Time: 9:00-10:00am on May 22
Location: Lecture Hall 001, Accolate East Building

Abstract: PageRank and HITS are brilliant examples of exploring the page links in the discovery of authoritative web pages and hubs. We show that the power of links can be systematically explored in the mining of information networks for link-based classification, clustering, information integration, and other interesting tasks. Some recent results of our research that explore the crucial information hidden in links will be introduced, including (1) multi-relational classification, (2) user-guided clustering, (3) link-based clustering, (4) object distinction analysis, and (5) veracity analysis. I conclude this talk by pointing out a set of interesting research problems.

Short Bio: Jiawei Han is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been working on research into data mining, data warehousing, database systems, data mining from spatiotemporal data, multimedia data, stream and RFID data, Web data, social network data, and biological data, with over 300 journal and conference publications. He has chaired or served on over 100 program committees of international conferences and workshops, including PC co-chair for KDD, SDM, and ICDM conferences, vice chair for ICDE and ICDM conferences, and Americas Coordinator for a VLDB conference. He is also serving as the founding Editor-In-Chief of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. He is an ACM Fellow and has received 2004 ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award and 2005 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award. His book "Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques" (2nd ed., Morgan Kaufmann, 2006) has been popularly used as a textbook worldwide.

Michael Lowry, NASA Ames Research Center

Title: Intelligent Software Engineering Tools for NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle

Time: 9:00-10:00am on May 23
Location: Lecture Hall 001, Accolate East Building

Abstract: Project Orion will develop a NASA's new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), including a modern avionics platform. Project Orion will be using a state-of-the art model-based software development process that provides productivity benefits and will enable re-targeting the flight software to different and upgraded platforms as the avionics evolves over the lifetime of CEV, as well as enabling a common code base for flight software, training, and simulation. This model-based software development process is new for the manned space program, and implies both new opportunities and risks for NASA. Opportunities include gaining early insight into designs in the form of executable models, and formulation of requirement verification conditions directly at the model level. Risks include autogenerated code. This paper will focus on advanced software engineering tools being developed by NASA. The tools interface directly to the new model-based software development process, and provide the following capabilities: early analysis at the model level to find defects when they are inexpensive to fix, automated testing and test suite generation that ensures requirements verification coverage, and innovative methods for verifying auto-generated code.

Short Bio: Dr. Lowry is Chief Scientist for Reliable Software in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center. He is the PI for the Intelligent Software Design research project within the Exploration Technology research program. The Intelligent Software Design project is developing innovative software technology principally for verification and validation of mission critical software. Dr. Lowry is also the NASA lead on software tools for the Crew Exploration Vehicle flight software, as well as software lead for Lunar Surface Systems.

Dr. Lowry's main technical interest is in applying automated reasoning to Software Engineering. After joining NASA Ames in 1992, he was the principal investigator on the Amphion project. Amphion automates the construction of programs from domain-oriented user specifications by composing subroutines from a reuse library. Amphion is a generic architecture that is specialized to a new domain by developing a declarative domain theory. Domain theories for several NASA applications have been successfully built, including Computational Fluid Dynamics, Space Observation Geometries, and Space Shuttle Navigation. Meta-Amphion was developed in 1995 as a means of generating additional Amphion applications, receiving the best paper award at the 10th Knowledge-Based Software Engineering conference.

Dr. Lowry has since led his group in developing innovative applications of automated reasoning for software engineering based on experience with NASA domains. This includes software model checking (2003 TGIR award), the before/after experiments with Deep-Space one, and new thrusts such as certifiable program synthesis and automated testing. Under his leadership, the automated software engineering group has grown from three people to fifteen people, and has developed collaborations with a number of NASA application projects including Space Shuttle SAFM, JPL Planetary Data Systems, JPL MER and MSL projects, and NASA Ames aviation capacity projects. He organized a NASA-wide workshop in April 2004 on reliable software, involving both NASA centers and the chief engineer.s office.

Dr. Lowry received his MS/BS from MIT and his PhD in 1989 from Stanford University in Computer Science. His PhD dissertation, "Algorithm Synthesis through Problem Reformulation" focused on formalizing and automating algorithm design and problem reformulation/abstraction. From 1989 to 1992 he was a computer scientist at the Kestrel Institute, and was principal investigator on several projects related to AI and Software Engineering. During his graduate studies he also did research in image understanding and speech understanding.