http://www.isri.cmu.edu/research/index.html
Website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wls
My research is in two areas: program manipulation tools and information structures for collaboration. I focus here on the Fluid Architecture project, which is in the first of these areas and involves the use of program analysis and manipulation techniques to support program development and evolution. Please feel free to come talk to me about any of these ideas, or about my research in computer-supported cooperative work (which is not covered here).
All programmers face the difficulty of having to make small-scale structural design decisions very early in the software process, well before the consequences of those decisions can be understood. For example, having decided to include an integrity check for a parameter, should the check be done at the procedure being called or at all calling sites? Which site is selected (or whether code is replicated in order to have it both ways) determines which optimization opportunities can be exploited, and is best decided later in the process. And in practice, once these small structural commitments are made, particularly in the design of an API, they can be very difficult to revise. My research hypothesis is that this brittleness is not a necessary attribute of software, and that semantics-based program analysis and manipulation techniques can offer a way for programmers to retain structural flexibility.
Program manipulation techniques of the sort we are exploring can also be used to adjust data representations or make other changes that require potentially pervasive alterations to code. A simple representational change to Java strings, for example, requires simultaneous changes to more than 80 methods. Practicing programmers can devote considerable effort to this "bureaucratic" business of organizing and reorganizing internal interfaces and encapsulations, maintaining and revising representation and control invariants, and managing response to exceptional conditions. Most of the time they are working with existing code.
I am interested in program analysis and manipulation techniques that can be embodied in tools that programmers can use easily for routine program evolution of this sort. For such tools to be practical, programmers must not have to write extensive specifications of program functionality or architecture. Also, the tools must be interactive, enabling software engineers to explore a space of possible design approaches and to explore multiple structural views of a system. To this end, we have built experimental tools for analyzing and manipulating Java programs.
Website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/
The Plaid Group, led by Jonathan Aldrich, uses languages and type systems to express and enforce architectural properties of software. Their current projects include checking the run-time structure of programs against an architecture, verifying semantic library and framework usage constraints using typestate and relationship checking, more expressive object models, and an educational proof assistant for reasoning about programs, languages, and logics.
Website: http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/faculty-staff/bareiss-ray.html
Dr. Ray Bareiss is a Professor of the Practice at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. Ray was formerly Executive Vice President and Senior Design Architect at Cognitive Arts, in charge of its New York office. Prior to joining Cognitive Arts, Ray was Assistant Director of the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) and an Associate Professor of computer science and education at Northwestern University.
Before joining ILS, he was on the faculty of Vanderbilt University. As a specialist in computer-based learning environments, corporate memory and computer-based performance support, cased-based reasoning and multimedia computing, Ray served as a senior software designer for many academic and corporate training courses.
Ray holds a Ph.D. in computer sciences and a B.S. in communications from the University of Texas at Austin. He has worked on academic e-learning courses for Columbia University in the fields of ESL, information technology, economics, physics, and psychology, and on courses for Northwestern University. Ray is the author of a number of books and articles.
Website: http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/bios/carley/carley.html
Kathleen M. Carley is the Director of ISR's Ph.D. program in Computation, Organizations and Society and the Director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS), a university wide center bring together state-of-the-art computational techniques and social/organizational research to address real world problems such as counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, organizational design and performance, team productivity, information and belief diffusion, and group dynamics. Research in CASOS goes from the highly theoretical, such as the work on network evolution, to the highly applied, such as the work on assessing public health organizations.
Kathleen M. Carley's research combines cognitive science, social networks and computer science to address complex social and organizational problems with a focus on generating applied solutions. She has worked extensively with the DOD, each service, the intelligence community and the IRS on a wide range of nework science and multi-agent modeling projects in areas such as command and control, assessment of terrorist networks, performance characteristics in America’s Army, and forecasting state-failure. She and her lab have developed infrastructure tools for analyzing large scale dynamic networks, such as al Qaeda and various multi-agent simulation systems for examining blue, green and red-force dynamics. One of the infrastructure tools, ORA, is a network-science statistical toolkit that deployed with the USS Tarawa and has been widely used in government and academic areas. Another tool is AutoMap, a text-mining system for extracting semantic networks from texts and then cross-classifying them using an organizational ontology into the underlying social, knowledge, resource and task networks. AutoMap and ORA form a tool chain that can be applied to locating and analyzing terror networks and is being operationalized for use at the behest of PACOM. Her simulation models meld multi-agent technology with network dynamics and empirical data. Three of the large-scale multi-agent network models she and the CASOS group have developed are: BioWar a city-scale dynamic-network agent-based model for understanding the spread of disease and illness due to natural epidemics, chemical spills, and weaponized biological attacks (Darpa, DHS, DTRA); DyNet a model of the change in covert networks naturally and in response to attacks, under varying levels of information uncertainty (ONR, DOD,UFOSR); and RTE a model for examining state failure and the escalation of conflict at the city, state, nation, and international as changes occur within and among red, blue, and green forces (UFOSR, DARPA).
Website: http://www.qatar.cmu.edu/research/index.php?pg=carter
Enhancement of embedded and other complex system management and engineering processes and methods as required to predictably deliver quality products and services. This work included the development, integration, and tailoring of best practices and reference models to fit specific mission and business needs, the development of customized assessment methods, and support to those adopting such methods and tools in order to gain predictable bottom line value. Research in Technology Change Management, assessing and documenting current best practices, determining how best to assist others to leverage them, and how to adopt these practices in a manner that brings predictable and lasting value.
Developed and tested methods to improve adoption speed , predictability, and enduring bottom-line value of new technologies in mission critical applications for organizations experiencing overload.
Validated and refined these methods in field trials at numerous customer sites.
Developed and established the SEI product line strategy, focusing SEI products on engineers, managers, and educators. This strategy is still used today.
Usable privacy and security
The privacy and security research community has become increasingly aware that usability problems severely impact the effectiveness of mechanisms designed to provide security and privacy in software systems. Our research employs a combination of three high-level strategies to make secure systems more usable: 1) building systems that just work, without involving humans in security-critical functions; 2) making secure systems intuitive and easy to use; and 3) teaching humans how to perform security-critical tasks. Please visit our website.
Privacy decision making:
While most people claim to be very concerned about their privacy, they do not consistently take actions to protect it. Web retailers detail their information practices in their privacy policies, but most of the time this information remains invisible to consumers. Our research focuses on understanding how individuals make privacy-related decisions and in finding ways to make privacy information more usable to consumers.
Supporting trust decisions:
When Internet users are asked to make trust decisions, for example, decisions about whether or not provide information in response to an email that claims to have been sent by a trusted entity, they often make the wrong decision. Attackers are able to take advantage of most users' poor trust decision-making skills through a class of attacks known as semantic attacks. Our research focuses both on automating the detection of phishing and other semantic attacks, and in educating end users about how to protect themselves from these attacks. Please visit our website.
Jeff Eppinger is interested in peer-to-peer software solutions. He has been doing research on NAT Traversal solutions and has developed tools for JavaBeans primarily for use in courses on Java. These tools provide bean factories for data persistence, forms processing, and remote procedure calls.
Task-oriented computing:
Introducing a new layer of system structure that captures users' goals and requirements. This layer can be exploited to relieve users of mundane chores (as in Project Aura), automate complex tasks (as in RADAR).
Self-managing systems:
New ways to add adaptivity into systems to support self-healing and self-improving. Involves both engineering (as in Rainbow) and reasoning (as in Jung Soo's work on reasoning about dynamic reconfiguration).
Software Architecture:
Techniques to support design, modeling, analysis, and construction of systems that reflect new architectural challenges: scale (as in ULS), uncertainty (as in systems that must interact with the physical world), large data (as in collaboration with Kathleen Carley).
Coordination, Communication, and Collaboration in Open Source Software Development:
Open source software runs the internet, dominates the server market, and is beginning to compete successfully in operating systems and even applications markets. Open source projects seem immune to the many problems that plague geographically distributed commercial development, as tens, hundreds, or thousands of developers collaborate successfully with minimal use of collaboration technology. In fact, open style collaboration is being adopted in many and diverse settings other than software, from writing an encyclopedia to solving difficult engineering design problems. This research seeks a deep understanding of the principles that allow open source communities to coordinate technical work despite radical geographic separation. Please view our project summary about this research.
The Role of Architecture in Facilitating Design Collaboration:
The intimate relationship between artifact architecture and collaboration in artifact design is widely acknowledged but inadequately understood. Architectures describe a system in terms of its high-level structures and the relationships between them. The decoupling of functionality defined by the architecture translates into a decoupling of the work, which makes collaboration feasible. Yet, components interact, and the details of these interactions create varied and potentially complex interdependencies in the design work. We are developing a scientific basis for, and experimental validation of, principles for relating architectures, the coordination needs they give rise to, and the coordination capabilities of organizations. Please view our project summary about this research.
Open Source in Software Value Chains:
As open source projects enter software value chains, forward-looking corporations have moved quickly to adopt new business models that leverage open source products and communities to create value in new ways. Clusters of firms surround many large open source projects such as Eclipse, Gnome, and Apache, creating emergent ecologies in which participants compete, cooperate, and occupy diverse economic niches. We seek to understand the role of software architectures, principles of governance, and the structures of incentives in supporting the success of open source ecologies. Please view our project summary about this research.
Anthony Lattanze's primary research interest is in the design of large, complex software intensive systems. He has been developing a method to guide the design of software intensive systems called the Architecture Centric Design Method (ACDM). ACDM was developed in conjunction with several industry partners and hundreds of practitioners. Currently it is being used by several early adopters in industry. This method is described in a textbook that is now in the copy edit process (Architecting Software Intensive Systems: A Practitioners Handbook). It is due on the shelves in August 2008. Beginning the summer of 2008, he will investigate the kinds of tools that might be used to support design activities as described by ACDM.
Dr. Mark C. Paulk's research interests revolve around best practices for software engineering and service management, high maturity practices, statistical thinking, and agile methods.
Million Book Project:
Dr. Reddy created the Million Book Project to host a Universal Library that will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Universal Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is expected that the collection will grow to 10 Million books. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world at all times without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background. For additional information, please visit
21st Century Gurukulam:
The 21st Century Gurukulam (21CG)is a new educational program which follows the "Learning by Doing' concept where students are facilitated with Mentors but not regular lecturers. It is modeled after the ancient Gurukulam and the modern-day Kibbutz. Its primary purpose is to provide remedial education and IT training leading to a postgraduate degree in IT for the current top 1% of the rural youth in India who are basically very intelligent but are weak in spoken English, communication and presentation skills.
PCtvt:
PCtvt is a $250 wirelessly networked personal computer intended for the four billion people around the world who live on less than $2,000 a year. The PCtvt is a multi-function device that can be controlled by a simple TV remote control and can function as a television, telephone, DVD player and a videophone. The goal of this project is to use PCtvt as a vehicle that can take computing and communications to populations that until now have been excluded from the digital world.
The e-Supply Chain Management:
The e-Supply Chain Management Laboratory develops decision support techniques and computational testbeds for emerging supply chain management practices. The Laboratory's current focus includes the development of dynamic supply chain trading technologies, the design of supply chain trading contracts as well as understanding the environmental impact of different supply chain management practices.
User-Controllable Security and Privacy:
Users are expected to set up an ever broader range of security and privacy policies (e.g. configuring security and privacy settings in their browsers, specifying spam filtering policies, or adjusting privacy preferences that control the disclosure of calendar or location information). Unfortunately, many studies show that users often have great difficulty specifying such policies, which in turn creates various sources of vulnerability. Our work in the area of User Controllable Security and Privacy focuses on developing new policy authoring and auditing tools that empower users to more effectively and efficiently specify security and privacy policies, with a particular emphasis on mobile and social networking applications.
Mobile and Pervasive Computing:
The Mobile Commerce Lab explores new mobile and pervasive computing technologies and applications aimed at enhancing enterprise productivity and quality of everyday life. Ongoing research weaves together technology, usability, security, privacy and business considerations. Solutions are evaluated and refined through pilots involving members of the campus community.
End User Software Engineering:
There will soon be 100 million end users of computing in the United States, perhaps half of them engaged in programming-like activity. These end users are ill-equipped to select, adapt, and integrate software, communication, and data components that are sufficiently good for their tasks. This team is developing techniques suitable for everyday users to develop sufficient confidence in software that is used routinely for everyday activities. ["Semantic Anomaly Detection", ICSE 2002; "Characterizing Feature Usage by Information Workers", VL/HCC 06]
Value-Driven Software Engineering: Vitruvius:
Mary Shaw, in collaboration with Ashish Arora, Shawn Butler, Kevin Sullivan, and others, has worked to incorporate cost concerns alongside capability concerns in software design. They approach this by adapting models and techniques from economics and social science. They developed a unified model for predicting the value - to a given user - of the implementation of a software design. This model harnesses a variety of existing models for predicting the properties of an implementation of a design, and it couples those predictions to specific clients' utility functions. ["Dynamic Reconfiguration of Resource-Aware Services", ICSE 2004; "Task-based Adaptation for Ubiquitous Computing", IEEE Tr Systems, Man, and Cybernetics C 2006]
Software Architectures: UniCon:
Mary Shaw and David Garlan have identified the architecture of software systems as a major research area, established the leading results, and stimulated widespread interest in the area. A software architecture defines the inter-module relations that determine the character of a system, in contrast to the intra-module definitions that deal with algorithms and data structures. Software designers use recognizable styles to select system structure; these styles depend on distinct kinds of components and of interactions among components. Architectural design can be supported by languages, models, tools, and analysis. [Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, Prentice-Hall, 1996; "The Golden Age of Software Architecture", IEEE Software, 2006.]
Engineering Practice and Software Engineering:
The startup of the Software Engineering Institute led me to review the status and needs of software engineering. The current emphasis of the field is on management activities. In order to become an engineering discipline, the emphasis must shift to the technical substance that supports usual engineering practice: models, analysis techniques, design criteria, and so on. An invited paper reviewed the evolution of traditional engineering disciplines and the implications for software engineering. ["Prospects for an Engineering Discipline of Software," IEEE Software, 1990, runner-up to the Best Paper in IEEE Software in 1990]. More recently, I have worked to clarify the paradigms of software engineering research and make them more rigorous and explicit. ["The Coming-of-Age of Software Architecture Research" Invited keynote, ICSE 2001; "Writing Good Software Engineering Research Papers", ICSE 2003].
Anthony Tomasic's research currently focuses on the intelligent desktop. This research combines human computer interaction and machine learning to create a more productive desktop. He is the director of the Very Large Information Systems (VLIS) professional master degree program. This program focuses on training the next generation of technologists.
Website: http://www.epp.cmu.edu/httpdocs/people/bios/tongia.html
Working Group on Enabling Environment:
Dr. Tongia is actively interested in understanding and addressing the digital divide. He served on the UN ICT Task Force as Vice-chair of the Working Group on Enabling Environment (formerly, Low-Cost Connectivity Access), and has a number of studies ongoing spanning access technologies, policies, regulation, etc. One working analysis examines leapfrog technologies and design for Africa. Please view our paper
that addresses reducing one aspect of the digital divide.
Information and Communications Technology:
Dr. Tongia is also actively interested in the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for sustainable development. Much of ICT's potential in areas such as energy, water, healthcare, education, etc. is yet unrealized, and his work seeks to combine domain expertise with rigorous metrics for practitioners and policy makers. Part of this work is done with CMU's TechBridgeWorld organization, which covers research, courses, student projects, and global partnerships. He will be Program co-Chair of the 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on ICT and Development, to be held in April, 2009.
William Scherlis
Director of ISR
Email: scherlis@cmu.eduWebsite: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wls
My research is in two areas: program manipulation tools and information structures for collaboration. I focus here on the Fluid Architecture project, which is in the first of these areas and involves the use of program analysis and manipulation techniques to support program development and evolution. Please feel free to come talk to me about any of these ideas, or about my research in computer-supported cooperative work (which is not covered here).
All programmers face the difficulty of having to make small-scale structural design decisions very early in the software process, well before the consequences of those decisions can be understood. For example, having decided to include an integrity check for a parameter, should the check be done at the procedure being called or at all calling sites? Which site is selected (or whether code is replicated in order to have it both ways) determines which optimization opportunities can be exploited, and is best decided later in the process. And in practice, once these small structural commitments are made, particularly in the design of an API, they can be very difficult to revise. My research hypothesis is that this brittleness is not a necessary attribute of software, and that semantics-based program analysis and manipulation techniques can offer a way for programmers to retain structural flexibility.
Program manipulation techniques of the sort we are exploring can also be used to adjust data representations or make other changes that require potentially pervasive alterations to code. A simple representational change to Java strings, for example, requires simultaneous changes to more than 80 methods. Practicing programmers can devote considerable effort to this "bureaucratic" business of organizing and reorganizing internal interfaces and encapsulations, maintaining and revising representation and control invariants, and managing response to exceptional conditions. Most of the time they are working with existing code.
I am interested in program analysis and manipulation techniques that can be embodied in tools that programmers can use easily for routine program evolution of this sort. For such tools to be practical, programmers must not have to write extensive specifications of program functionality or architecture. Also, the tools must be interactive, enabling software engineers to explore a space of possible design approaches and to explore multiple structural views of a system. To this end, we have built experimental tools for analyzing and manipulating Java programs.
Jonathan Aldrich
Assistant Professor
Email: jonathan.aldrich@cs.cmu.eduWebsite: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/
The Plaid Group, led by Jonathan Aldrich, uses languages and type systems to express and enforce architectural properties of software. Their current projects include checking the run-time structure of programs against an architecture, verifying semantic library and framework usage constraints using typestate and relationship checking, more expressive object models, and an educational proof assistant for reasoning about programs, languages, and logics.
Ray Bareiss
Associate Teaching Professor, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley
Email: bareiss@cs.cmu.eduWebsite: http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/faculty-staff/bareiss-ray.html
Dr. Ray Bareiss is a Professor of the Practice at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. Ray was formerly Executive Vice President and Senior Design Architect at Cognitive Arts, in charge of its New York office. Prior to joining Cognitive Arts, Ray was Assistant Director of the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) and an Associate Professor of computer science and education at Northwestern University.
Before joining ILS, he was on the faculty of Vanderbilt University. As a specialist in computer-based learning environments, corporate memory and computer-based performance support, cased-based reasoning and multimedia computing, Ray served as a senior software designer for many academic and corporate training courses.
Ray holds a Ph.D. in computer sciences and a B.S. in communications from the University of Texas at Austin. He has worked on academic e-learning courses for Columbia University in the fields of ESL, information technology, economics, physics, and psychology, and on courses for Northwestern University. Ray is the author of a number of books and articles.
Kathleen M. Carley
Professor of Computer Science<br>Director, COS Ph.D. Program
Email: kathleen.carley@cs.cmu.eduWebsite: http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/bios/carley/carley.html
Kathleen M. Carley is the Director of ISR's Ph.D. program in Computation, Organizations and Society and the Director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS), a university wide center bring together state-of-the-art computational techniques and social/organizational research to address real world problems such as counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, organizational design and performance, team productivity, information and belief diffusion, and group dynamics. Research in CASOS goes from the highly theoretical, such as the work on network evolution, to the highly applied, such as the work on assessing public health organizations.
Kathleen M. Carley's research combines cognitive science, social networks and computer science to address complex social and organizational problems with a focus on generating applied solutions. She has worked extensively with the DOD, each service, the intelligence community and the IRS on a wide range of nework science and multi-agent modeling projects in areas such as command and control, assessment of terrorist networks, performance characteristics in America’s Army, and forecasting state-failure. She and her lab have developed infrastructure tools for analyzing large scale dynamic networks, such as al Qaeda and various multi-agent simulation systems for examining blue, green and red-force dynamics. One of the infrastructure tools, ORA, is a network-science statistical toolkit that deployed with the USS Tarawa and has been widely used in government and academic areas. Another tool is AutoMap, a text-mining system for extracting semantic networks from texts and then cross-classifying them using an organizational ontology into the underlying social, knowledge, resource and task networks. AutoMap and ORA form a tool chain that can be applied to locating and analyzing terror networks and is being operationalized for use at the behest of PACOM. Her simulation models meld multi-agent technology with network dynamics and empirical data. Three of the large-scale multi-agent network models she and the CASOS group have developed are: BioWar a city-scale dynamic-network agent-based model for understanding the spread of disease and illness due to natural epidemics, chemical spills, and weaponized biological attacks (Darpa, DHS, DTRA); DyNet a model of the change in covert networks naturally and in response to attacks, under varying levels of information uncertainty (ONR, DOD,UFOSR); and RTE a model for examining state failure and the escalation of conflict at the city, state, nation, and international as changes occur within and among red, blue, and green forces (UFOSR, DARPA).
Lynn Carter
Principal Fellow, Carnegie Mellon Qatar
Email: lrcarter@cmu.eduWebsite: http://www.qatar.cmu.edu/research/index.php?pg=carter
Enhancement of embedded and other complex system management and engineering processes and methods as required to predictably deliver quality products and services. This work included the development, integration, and tailoring of best practices and reference models to fit specific mission and business needs, the development of customized assessment methods, and support to those adopting such methods and tools in order to gain predictable bottom line value. Research in Technology Change Management, assessing and documenting current best practices, determining how best to assist others to leverage them, and how to adopt these practices in a manner that brings predictable and lasting value.
Developed and tested methods to improve adoption speed , predictability, and enduring bottom-line value of new technologies in mission critical applications for organizations experiencing overload.
Validated and refined these methods in field trials at numerous customer sites.
Developed and established the SEI product line strategy, focusing SEI products on engineers, managers, and educators. This strategy is still used today.
Lorrie Faith Cranor
Associate Professor
Website: http://lorrie.cranor.org/Usable privacy and security
The privacy and security research community has become increasingly aware that usability problems severely impact the effectiveness of mechanisms designed to provide security and privacy in software systems. Our research employs a combination of three high-level strategies to make secure systems more usable: 1) building systems that just work, without involving humans in security-critical functions; 2) making secure systems intuitive and easy to use; and 3) teaching humans how to perform security-critical tasks. Please visit our website.
Privacy decision making:
While most people claim to be very concerned about their privacy, they do not consistently take actions to protect it. Web retailers detail their information practices in their privacy policies, but most of the time this information remains invisible to consumers. Our research focuses on understanding how individuals make privacy-related decisions and in finding ways to make privacy information more usable to consumers.
Supporting trust decisions:
When Internet users are asked to make trust decisions, for example, decisions about whether or not provide information in response to an email that claims to have been sent by a trusted entity, they often make the wrong decision. Attackers are able to take advantage of most users' poor trust decision-making skills through a class of attacks known as semantic attacks. Our research focuses both on automating the detection of phishing and other semantic attacks, and in educating end users about how to protect themselves from these attacks. Please visit our website.
Jeff Eppinger
Professor of the Practice/Principal Systems Scientist
Website: http://www.jeffeppinger.comJeff Eppinger is interested in peer-to-peer software solutions. He has been doing research on NAT Traversal solutions and has developed tools for JavaBeans primarily for use in courses on Java. These tools provide bean factories for data persistence, forms processing, and remote procedure calls.
David Garlan
Professor
Website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~garlanTask-oriented computing:
Introducing a new layer of system structure that captures users' goals and requirements. This layer can be exploited to relieve users of mundane chores (as in Project Aura), automate complex tasks (as in RADAR).
Self-managing systems:
New ways to add adaptivity into systems to support self-healing and self-improving. Involves both engineering (as in Rainbow) and reasoning (as in Jung Soo's work on reasoning about dynamic reconfiguration).
Software Architecture:
Techniques to support design, modeling, analysis, and construction of systems that reflect new architectural challenges: scale (as in ULS), uncertainty (as in systems that must interact with the physical world), large data (as in collaboration with Kathleen Carley).
Jim Herbsleb
Professor
Website: http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/Coordination, Communication, and Collaboration in Open Source Software Development:
Open source software runs the internet, dominates the server market, and is beginning to compete successfully in operating systems and even applications markets. Open source projects seem immune to the many problems that plague geographically distributed commercial development, as tens, hundreds, or thousands of developers collaborate successfully with minimal use of collaboration technology. In fact, open style collaboration is being adopted in many and diverse settings other than software, from writing an encyclopedia to solving difficult engineering design problems. This research seeks a deep understanding of the principles that allow open source communities to coordinate technical work despite radical geographic separation. Please view our project summary about this research.
The Role of Architecture in Facilitating Design Collaboration:
The intimate relationship between artifact architecture and collaboration in artifact design is widely acknowledged but inadequately understood. Architectures describe a system in terms of its high-level structures and the relationships between them. The decoupling of functionality defined by the architecture translates into a decoupling of the work, which makes collaboration feasible. Yet, components interact, and the details of these interactions create varied and potentially complex interdependencies in the design work. We are developing a scientific basis for, and experimental validation of, principles for relating architectures, the coordination needs they give rise to, and the coordination capabilities of organizations. Please view our project summary about this research.
Open Source in Software Value Chains:
As open source projects enter software value chains, forward-looking corporations have moved quickly to adopt new business models that leverage open source products and communities to create value in new ways. Clusters of firms surround many large open source projects such as Eclipse, Gnome, and Apache, creating emergent ecologies in which participants compete, cooperate, and occupy diverse economic niches. We seek to understand the role of software architectures, principles of governance, and the structures of incentives in supporting the success of open source ecologies. Please view our project summary about this research.
Anthony Lattanze
Assocate Teaching Professor
Website: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/al45/Anthony Lattanze's primary research interest is in the design of large, complex software intensive systems. He has been developing a method to guide the design of software intensive systems called the Architecture Centric Design Method (ACDM). ACDM was developed in conjunction with several industry partners and hundreds of practitioners. Currently it is being used by several early adopters in industry. This method is described in a textbook that is now in the copy edit process (Architecting Software Intensive Systems: A Practitioners Handbook). It is due on the shelves in August 2008. Beginning the summer of 2008, he will investigate the kinds of tools that might be used to support design activities as described by ACDM.
Mark Paulk
Senior Systems Scientist
Website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mcp/Dr. Mark C. Paulk's research interests revolve around best practices for software engineering and service management, high maturity practices, statistical thinking, and agile methods.
Raj Reddy
Mozah Bint Nasser University Professor
Website: http://www.rr.cs.cmu.edu/Million Book Project:
Dr. Reddy created the Million Book Project to host a Universal Library that will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Universal Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is expected that the collection will grow to 10 Million books. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world at all times without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background. For additional information, please visit
21st Century Gurukulam:
The 21st Century Gurukulam (21CG)is a new educational program which follows the "Learning by Doing' concept where students are facilitated with Mentors but not regular lecturers. It is modeled after the ancient Gurukulam and the modern-day Kibbutz. Its primary purpose is to provide remedial education and IT training leading to a postgraduate degree in IT for the current top 1% of the rural youth in India who are basically very intelligent but are weak in spoken English, communication and presentation skills.
PCtvt:
PCtvt is a $250 wirelessly networked personal computer intended for the four billion people around the world who live on less than $2,000 a year. The PCtvt is a multi-function device that can be controlled by a simple TV remote control and can function as a television, telephone, DVD player and a videophone. The goal of this project is to use PCtvt as a vehicle that can take computing and communications to populations that until now have been excluded from the digital world.
Norman M. Sadeh
Professor
Website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sadeh/The e-Supply Chain Management:
The e-Supply Chain Management Laboratory develops decision support techniques and computational testbeds for emerging supply chain management practices. The Laboratory's current focus includes the development of dynamic supply chain trading technologies, the design of supply chain trading contracts as well as understanding the environmental impact of different supply chain management practices.
User-Controllable Security and Privacy:
Users are expected to set up an ever broader range of security and privacy policies (e.g. configuring security and privacy settings in their browsers, specifying spam filtering policies, or adjusting privacy preferences that control the disclosure of calendar or location information). Unfortunately, many studies show that users often have great difficulty specifying such policies, which in turn creates various sources of vulnerability. Our work in the area of User Controllable Security and Privacy focuses on developing new policy authoring and auditing tools that empower users to more effectively and efficiently specify security and privacy policies, with a particular emphasis on mobile and social networking applications.
Mobile and Pervasive Computing:
The Mobile Commerce Lab explores new mobile and pervasive computing technologies and applications aimed at enhancing enterprise productivity and quality of everyday life. Ongoing research weaves together technology, usability, security, privacy and business considerations. Solutions are evaluated and refined through pilots involving members of the campus community.
Mary Shaw
AJ Perlis Professor
Website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~shawEnd User Software Engineering:
There will soon be 100 million end users of computing in the United States, perhaps half of them engaged in programming-like activity. These end users are ill-equipped to select, adapt, and integrate software, communication, and data components that are sufficiently good for their tasks. This team is developing techniques suitable for everyday users to develop sufficient confidence in software that is used routinely for everyday activities. ["Semantic Anomaly Detection", ICSE 2002; "Characterizing Feature Usage by Information Workers", VL/HCC 06]
Value-Driven Software Engineering: Vitruvius:
Mary Shaw, in collaboration with Ashish Arora, Shawn Butler, Kevin Sullivan, and others, has worked to incorporate cost concerns alongside capability concerns in software design. They approach this by adapting models and techniques from economics and social science. They developed a unified model for predicting the value - to a given user - of the implementation of a software design. This model harnesses a variety of existing models for predicting the properties of an implementation of a design, and it couples those predictions to specific clients' utility functions. ["Dynamic Reconfiguration of Resource-Aware Services", ICSE 2004; "Task-based Adaptation for Ubiquitous Computing", IEEE Tr Systems, Man, and Cybernetics C 2006]
Software Architectures: UniCon:
Mary Shaw and David Garlan have identified the architecture of software systems as a major research area, established the leading results, and stimulated widespread interest in the area. A software architecture defines the inter-module relations that determine the character of a system, in contrast to the intra-module definitions that deal with algorithms and data structures. Software designers use recognizable styles to select system structure; these styles depend on distinct kinds of components and of interactions among components. Architectural design can be supported by languages, models, tools, and analysis. [Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, Prentice-Hall, 1996; "The Golden Age of Software Architecture", IEEE Software, 2006.]
Engineering Practice and Software Engineering:
The startup of the Software Engineering Institute led me to review the status and needs of software engineering. The current emphasis of the field is on management activities. In order to become an engineering discipline, the emphasis must shift to the technical substance that supports usual engineering practice: models, analysis techniques, design criteria, and so on. An invited paper reviewed the evolution of traditional engineering disciplines and the implications for software engineering. ["Prospects for an Engineering Discipline of Software," IEEE Software, 1990, runner-up to the Best Paper in IEEE Software in 1990]. More recently, I have worked to clarify the paradigms of software engineering research and make them more rigorous and explicit. ["The Coming-of-Age of Software Architecture Research" Invited keynote, ICSE 2001; "Writing Good Software Engineering Research Papers", ICSE 2003].
Anthony Tomasic
Senior Systems Scientist
Website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tomasic/Anthony Tomasic's research currently focuses on the intelligent desktop. This research combines human computer interaction and machine learning to create a more productive desktop. He is the director of the Very Large Information Systems (VLIS) professional master degree program. This program focuses on training the next generation of technologists.
Rahul Tongia
Working Group on Enabling Environment:
Dr. Tongia is actively interested in understanding and addressing the digital divide. He served on the UN ICT Task Force as Vice-chair of the Working Group on Enabling Environment (formerly, Low-Cost Connectivity Access), and has a number of studies ongoing spanning access technologies, policies, regulation, etc. One working analysis examines leapfrog technologies and design for Africa. Please view our paper
that addresses reducing one aspect of the digital divide.
Information and Communications Technology:
Dr. Tongia is also actively interested in the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for sustainable development. Much of ICT's potential in areas such as energy, water, healthcare, education, etc. is yet unrealized, and his work seeks to combine domain expertise with rigorous metrics for practitioners and policy makers. Part of this work is done with CMU's TechBridgeWorld organization, which covers research, courses, student projects, and global partnerships. He will be Program co-Chair of the 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on ICT and Development, to be held in April, 2009.
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