Category Archives: lero

May 2009 Paper Accepted to ICSOFT 2009


Congrats to Emil and Mike my co-authors for our newly accepted paper entitled “A self-adaptive architecture for autonomic systems developed with ASSL” at ICSOFT 2009, the 4th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies.

“The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested on information technology and software development. The conference tracks are “Software Engineering”, “Information Systems and Data Management”, “Programming Languages”, “Distributed and Parallel Systems” and “Knowledge Engineering”.

Software and data technologies are essential for developing any computer information system, encompassing a large number of research topics and applications: from programming issues to the more abstract theoretical aspects of software engineering; from databases and data-warehouses to the most complex management information systems; knowledge-base systems; Distributed systems, ubiquity, data quality and many other topics are included in the scope of ICSOFT.”

Feb 2009 CHI Workshop and Surface User Interfaces

I just blogged about Surface User Interfaces on the “Evaluating new interactions in healthcare” blog. We have a paper [1] on “Design Patterns” at this workshop during CHI which this blog is being used to support. While I don’t think I can attend the workshop myself as I have trips to the USA, Sweden, Germany and Australia in the next two months my colleague Julie Doyle will attend. My PhD student Ross Shannon will also attend to present our paper on “Time Sequences” during the work in progress at CHI in Boston.

Figure 1: SharePic photo sharing system [3]

[1] Doyle J., Quigley A. and Nixon P., “Do Pattern Languages help us Structure Evaluations in Healthcare Technologies?” proceedings of the CHI 2009 Workshop on Evaluating New Interactions in Healthcare: Challenges and Approaches, Boston USA, April 2009.

[2] Shannon R., Quigley A. and Nixon P. (2009). Time Sequences. In CHI ’09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, Massachusetts, April 04 – 09, 2009). CHI ’09. ACM, New York, NY. (in press)

[3] Apted, T., Kay, J., and Quigley, A. 2006. Tabletop sharing of digital photographs for the elderly. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 – 27, 2006). R. Grinter, T. Rodden, P. Aoki, E. Cutrell, R. Jeffries, and G. Olson, Eds. CHI ’06. ACM, New York, NY, 781-790.

Feb 2009 CHI 2009 Work In Progress paper

Congrats to Ross on having his work in progress paper accepted to CHI 2009 to be published as an extended abstract.

Shannon R., Quigley A. and Nixon P. (2009). Time Sequences. In CHI ’09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, Massachusetts, April 04 – 09, 2009). CHI ’09. ACM, New York, NY. (in press)

Nov 2008 Emil Vassev starts as a postdoctoral fellow

Emil VassevWelcome to Dr. Emil Vassev from
Concordia University in Montreal, Canada to the Systems Research Group. Emil recently completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science and his thesis was on ASSL a “Framework for Specification and Code Generation of Autonomic Systems”.

ASSL: Autonomic System Specification Language is a framework that implies a multi-tier structure for specifying autonomic systems. The ASSL framework is defined through formalization tiers. Over these tiers, ASSL provides a layered structure for specifying ASs as formal executable models. ASSL defines an AS with its interaction protocol and autonomic elements.

Earlier this year Emil had a paper with Mike Hinchey the new research director for Lero so we expect this collaboration to continue as new ones develop with us all here in the SRG. The paper was entitled “Towards an ASSL Specification Model for NASA Swarm-Based Exploration Missions.” Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2008).

Emil was awarded a highly competitive IRCSET Postdoctoral Fellowship earlier this year to join me as a postdoc in the SRG. Over the coming weeks Emil will give some informal seminars on his research both here and in Limerick. In time he will give a seminar during an RSS and as a school seminar.

June 2008 Lero – The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre

Lero

Today I am attending the Lero CSET year 2 review dry run in the UCD CASL. Our
colleagues from around Ireland have come together today to give an overview of
our research efforts to one another. We just heard from Professor Kevin Ryan
on the vision, mission, goals and achievements of Lero to date. Collectively
these have been very significant in terms of publications, graduate school,
industry engagement, conferences hosted in Ireland etc.

Professor Mike Hinchey who has just joined UL and is the research co-director for
Lero is giving us his personal vision and initial plans for Lero going forward to
years 3 and beyond. His background as Director of the Software Engineering
Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre will bring new vision and insight to the
problems of developing reliable and flexible evolving systems.

Feb 2008 Lero Postgraduate Posts

The LERO Graduate School in Software Engineering – LGSSE – the main education initiative of LERO- offers a four year PhD Programme jointly provided by the four Irish Universities involved in LERO (The University of Limerick, UCD, TCD aand DCU). LGSSE is now offering 12 generous four-year PhD studentships covering stipend, equipment and fees, awarded on a competitive basis.

For full detasils, please see the LGSSE website at http://www.lgsse.ie Please note that there is no fixed closing date. Applications are processed on a rolling basis.

[ more ]

Oct 2007 Three Open Postdoc Posts

3 postdoctoral research positions available in:

* wireless sensor networks
* software engineering for autonomic systems
* enterprise systems engineering

Systems Research Group
School of Computer Science and Informatics
UCD Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

The group
=========

UCD’s Systems Research Group conducts world-recognised research in
software and systems engineering, with particular emphasis on
pervasive computing, autonomic communications, software development of
dependable systems, complex systems visualisation and embedded systems
design. SRG is unique in spanning the range of systems disciplines
from hardware and programming up to mathematical modeling and
analysis, and places great emphasis on collaborative research that
leverages this expertise. The group is accommodated within UCD’s
Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL, http://casl.ucd.ie/), a
groundbraking facility that brings together researchers in computer
science, mathematics, bioinformatics, physical and earth sciences to
conduct researech in a highly cross-disciplinary environment. SRG
currently consists of five academic staff, three postdoctoral
researchers and around 30 graduate students (almost all fully-funded)
studying both full- and part-time for advanced degrees. The group has
a current grant portfolio worth over EUR3.5M and a publication output
of over 30 papers per year in world-leading conferences and journals.

As part of its on-going research programme, SRG has vacancies for
three talented and well-motivated postdoctoral researchers to help
drive the group’s evolution. Suitable candidates will have a
successful academic record to doctoral level, together with a
portfolio of internationally peer-reviewed conference and journal
publications and evidence of significant future potential in
research. Furthermore they will be expected to engage broadly in the
development of the group, the supervision of graduate students and
other activities.

Salaries for all three posts will be in the range EUR37,886 –
EUR46,043 depending on qualifications and experience. All posts are of
two years’ durattion with the possibility of extension, and will be
probational for the first 12 months.

The positions
=============

Postdoctoral researcher in wireless sensor networks
—————————————————

The successful candidate will conduct and manage research in the area
of wireless sensor networks embedded into the built environment,
providing advanced sensor and actuator capabilities within built
artefacts. This will take place within the framework of a large-scale
collaboration managed by Cork Institute of Technology and including
several other Irish universities and public bodies, which will also
fund two studentships in the area. A track record of research in one
or more of pervasive computing, network analysis, embedded systems
development and systems architecture are essential, as is a
willingness to learn and work in a variety of new areas. Further
particulars can be obtained from Dr Simon Dobson
(simon.dobson@ucd.ie).

Postdoctoral researcher in software engineering for autonomic systems
———————————————————————

The successful candidate will work in conjunction with LERO, the Irish
Software Engineering Research Centre (http://www.lero.ie) to conduct
research into improving the principles and practice of engineering
autonomic systems — self-managing, self-optimising, self-healing and
so forth. Current interests include programming languages and
approaches, middleware, complex systems visualisation, and
mathematical models of software engineering, and a track record in one
or more of these areas are essential. The researcher will join a team
including an exisiting postdoc and four fully-funded graduate
students. Further particulars can be obtained from Dr Aaron Quigley
(aaron.quigley@ucd.ie).

Postdoctoral researcher in enterprise systems engineering
———————————————————

The successful candidate will work in collaboration with Oracle
Ireland Ltd on the development of improved models and techniques for
diagnosing, predicting and managing faults and failures within
large-scale distributed software systems. A track record in one or
more of distributed systems, autonomic computing, dependable systems,
fault-tolerance and fault analysis are essential. Further particulars
may be obtained from Prof Paddy Nixon (paddy.nixon@ucd.ie).

To apply
========

Please direct expressions of interest (including short CV) to the
contact individual named above for the specific post of
interest. Applications will be accepted until all posts are filled.

CASL Logo

Sept 2007 Masterclass in Software Architecture

Next week along with a few invited software architecture leaders and members of UK and Irish academia I am attending an IBM Masterclass. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to learn more about this area due to my work with Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre.

Grady Booch Software Architecture Masterclass 13th and 14th September 2007 Royal Academy of Engineering, London

The objectives include:
• Sharing participant understanding of the state of the art
• Exploring opportunities for research
• Identifying curriculum needs and ways of meeting them
• Exploring opportunities for collaborative initiatives
• Strengthening relationships between academia and IBM

Following a keynote from IBM Fellow Grady Booch, participants will break out into a succession of affinity groups to share understanding and experience, and discuss further initiatives.

July 2007 Conference Roles IBM CAS 2007, AmI 2007, IOT 2008, Pervasive 2008

The summer is a busy time for completing research projects ready for publication in the coming year. Along with completing research projects the summer is also a busy time for reviewing papers for conferences coming up at the end of the year and for planning for events in the coming year.

I am the Program Chair for the IBM CAS Software and Systems Engineering Symposium 2007, Dublin Ireland, October 24. This has been a lot of work with the program committee reviewing and deciding on papers for publication. In addition, I’ve been busy reviewing papers for AmI-07 the European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI-07), Darmstadt, Germany November 7-10. Along with acting as program chair and a program committee member this month I’ve also be busy with planning for future events almost 12 months away.

In 2008 I will be the Late Breaking Results Chair for the Sixth International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2008) on May 19-22 in Sydney, Australia. I will also be a member of the international program committee for Pervasive 2008. Another event of interest is the new Internet of Things International Conference for Industry and Academia on March 26-28 2008 in Zurich Switzerland where I will be on the Scientific Program Committee.

For more details see my [ Call for Papers Feed ]

IOT Logo

July 2007 New Papers [Ross Shannon]

The students in my group have been publishing a number of a new papers of late.

Ross Shannon has had two papers accepted in recent months, one on collecting and reasoning about context data from sensors in the environment and another on visualising communications in ad-hoc networks. “Towards Scatterbox: a Context-Aware Message Forwarding Platform”, to be presented at MRC 07 at Context 07, presents ongoing work from our group in designing reasoning frameworks that can collate and reason about large amounts of context data gleaned from a wide range of sensors in a smart environment. In this case we have designed a system that decides to forward only relevant emails to a user’s mobile device, where their attention should only be drawn to important messages.

The second paper, “Visualising Network Communications to Evaluate a Data Dissemination Method for Ubiquitous Systems” presents a novel visualisation application useful for designers of ubiquitous systems to be presented at Ubiquitous Systems Evaluation 2007 in September. As these systems will generally be designed to use ad-hoc networks of heterogeneous devices, many of which will join and leave the network
constantly, the stability of the data within the network is crucially important. The visualisation depicts an evolving network topology, which draws attention to nodes which have not passed their data to
other nodes in the system, thus making them more at risk of data loss if they leave the network before passing on this information. The visualisation can thus be used as an aid to the designer of the
communication protocol to view the emergent behaviours of their data dissemination algorithm.