Category Archives: lero

July 2007 Panelist – 20th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training

CSEET 2007 Logo

In early July 2007 I was an invited panelists at the Conference for Software Engineering Education and Training, 2007 (CSEET 2007) on “Preparing Students for Software Engineering Research“.
Along with these panelists:
Dr. Laurie Williams, North Carolina State University, USA
Mr. Austin Hanley, Head of School of Engineering, Athlone Institute of Technology, Ireland
Dr. Brian O’Donovan, IBM, Blanchardstown, Dublin, Ireland
My discussion points were built around the following point from [Shaw 2000] “Software Engineering Education: A Roadmap” that says:
“Preparation for research, of course, is different from preparation for engineering practice. A researcher needs deeper preparation in underlying principles, in problem formulation, and in validation of results as well as a special kind of inquisitiveness and creativity.“
My points included:

  • Software Engineering Research is about discovering, interpreting, and revising our knowledge of the field
  • I believe that preparation for research in industry can only be achieved in the scope of postgraduate education
  • in teaching we should emphasise where current engineering practice fails when teaching it, identify problems as research opportunities
  • we should rovide opportunities for summer research internships in 2nd and 3rd year undergrads, such as our ODCSSS program in UCD-DCU
  • we should build awareness of open software engineering research issues faced in academic and industrial research labs
  • in teaching underlying principles try ideas such as eg. comparative learning (programming, development)
  • in teaching problem formulation try to weave learning how to describe a problem (not the solution) into course work
  • in teaching validation of results incorporate experimental methods into courses
  • to support inquisitiveness provide bottom up support for competitions, clubs, internships, industry prizes
  • to support creativity provide scope in all course work to step beyond the practice to discover an alternate approach.

The overall moderator Ita Richardson framed the question as:
“Discussions of software engineering education tend to focus on the needs of industry and the preparation of graduates for professional careers. This is understandable, and may even be appropriate, but what about those who hope to go on to do research in software engineering – how well are we catering for them?“

June 2007 SRG students attend Software Engineering Research Summer School

Lipari

As part of the project SPL1 – Visualisation of Software Project Lines, UCD@Lero the Irish Software Engineering Research centre is providing support for Luke O’Malley one of my MSc students to the attend a summer school on software engineering which will take place from July 9th to July 21st on the island of Lipari, Italy. The school is chaired by Prof. Alfredo Ferro form the University of Catania and Prof. Egon Boerger from the University of Pisa. The courses offered will cover a wide range of software engineering topics, including

  • Domain Engineering, Prof. Dines Bjoerner, Technical University of Denmark, DK.
  • Feature Modularity in Software Product Lines, Prof Don Batory, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.
  • Requirements Engineering, Prof. Florin Spanachi, SAP Research Karlsruhe.
  • Evolvable Software Products, Prof. Peter Sestoft, Department of Natural Sciences, Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, DK.
  • Web Services, Prof. Boualem Benatallah, The University of New South Wales, Australia.
  • High-Level Modeling Patterns, Prof. Egon Boerger, University of Pisa, Italy.
  • Principles and challenges of software architecture evolution, Prof. Carlo Ghezzi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy.
  • Distributed Systems Security, Prof. Dieter Gollmann, Hamburg-Harburg (TUHH),Germany

Luke hopes to gain a better understanding of software engineering and in particular learn more on the topic of software product lines which is directly related to his research. In addition he hopes to engage and discuss with other students at the school about their particular research topics. – Luke O’Malley

Main Sponsors

Universita di Catania
Facolta SMFN UNICT
Universita di Pisa
Lombardia Informatica
L'Informatica
Springer
LNCS
indam

Mar 2007 IBM CAS Conference CFP

IBM Dublin CAS Banner

The Preliminary Call for Papers for the IBM CAS Software and Systems Engineering Symposium 2007 has now been published. This is the third annual IBM Dublin CAS research symposia organised as a multi-track single day event on October 24th 2007. This symposium is organised in association with CASCON 2007 -The 17th Annual International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering – URL (http://witanweb.ca/cascon2007/) and in cooperation with Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Center URL (http://www.lero.ie). A number of staff from the School of Computer Science & Informatics and Lero@UCD, LERO@UL, LERO@TCD and LERO@DCU are involved with the organisation and program committee for this Symposium.

Nov 2007 Best Paper Award

We won the Best Paper award for “Visualisation Techniques to Support Derivation Tasks in Software Product Line Development” authored by Nestor D., O’Malley L., Healy P., Quigley A., Thiel S., at the IBM CAS Software and Systems Engineering Symposium 2007.

The IBM Centre for Advanced Studies Dublin Symposium 2007 Wednesday on October 24th 2007 was organised in association with CASCON 2007, the 17th Annual International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (http://witanweb.ca/cascon2007/), and in cooperation with Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Center ( http://www.lero.ie).

The IBM CAS Software and Systems Engineering Symposium 2007 featured a keynote presentation from Professor Stefan Decker, DERI, research papers, a research panel on Sustainablility and Technology – Good partners? as a shared session (video conference) with CASCON 2007 in Canada, a research poster session and a capstone talk from Dr Steven Collins of Trinity College Dublin. The technical papers program featured original, internationally peer- reviewed research papers in the area of Software and Systems Engineering.

July 2006 Automotive Software – opportunities for Irish graduates, Technology Ireland Article

Quoted in a piece on Automotive Software – opportunities for Irish graduates, Technology Ireland, Issue 3 Vol 37.

Automotive software (Automobile Sector) is an expanding area of software engineering and embedded systems research and development. Within the next five years, premium cars are expected to host a cumulated amount of up to one gigabyte of binary code of software deployed via a set of interconnected embedded platforms. Software developers  already working in other domains like industrial automation systems and embedded telecommunications systems can readily transfer their skills to the automotive software sector .  The Irish government via the Science Foundation Ireland has funded the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre Lero with a focus on automotive software engineering (our focus in UCD is on Software Product Lines, Visualisation and Autonomic Software Systems). To design, implement and manage the complexity of such a huge, heterogeneous distributed system with increasingly short innovation cycles and a vast installed base, neither the techniques and methods of classical embedded systems are suitable, nor the known ones in the desktop and business software domain. “Automotive Software Engineering is a good example of how the Irish full end-to-end knowledge economy can be marshalled, in short order, for a high growth and high value area…The standard will be built around globally distributed software development using next generation visualisation tools in the development of autonomic automotie systems”.  To tackle this challenge, we need newly adapted software engineering methods for the automotive domain that allow to specifically design the different software types, corresponding to their requirements, and to later on integrate the system parts into one reliable and manageable system. A specific example of this is the move from proprietary software architectures to industry wide standards. Current automotive systems consist of different electronic control units, a controller area network, sensors and actuators. Current industry wide efforts include a group developing the open standard AUTOSAR, which aims to have a common automotive architecture for developing vehicular software, user interfaces and management.


References

  1. http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/pretscha/events/seas05/
  2. Automotive Software – opportunities for Irish graduates,  Technology Ireland, Issue 3, Vol 37, July/August 2006 

Lero – The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre.

Books

Conferences: 

Past Events:

http://www.vmars.tuwien.ac.at/summerschool/ http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/pretscha/events/seas05/

Lero Partners Ireland and Europe:

Aimware
Analog Devices (I)
Ashling Microsystems
Beaumont Hospital
Robert Bosch GmbH 
IBM Ireland 
Iona Technologies plc
Intel Ireland Ltd 
Kugler Maag cie
Motorola Ireland
Piercom
QAD Ireland Ltd
Silicon & Software Systems
eVolve Systems

Others:

Society of Automotive EngineersYazaki CorporationJohnson Controls
DENSO
ZF Friedrichshafen AG
DaimlerChrysler. Research and Technology
FORD Research
AbsInt

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