Keynote Speakers

  • Patrick Lardieri, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Lab
  • Mary Shaw, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Kevin Sullivan, University of Virginia

"Challenges in Developing DoD Software Intensive Systems"
Patrick Lardieri

Abstract:
Department of Defense programs continue to experience a greater reliance on software for critical functionality and greater difficulty in developing reliable and fully capable software for a given cost and schedule. While great strides have been made in the tooling for developing and testing software code, great challenges remain in the system design of software intensive systems that result incomplete design specifications. These design holes lead to costly system integration problems and capability and performance shortfalls that drive cost and schedule overruns and result in degraded operational capability. Abstract modeling technologies can improve our ability to manage system design complexity of software systems by addressing two fundamental challenges: knowledge fragmentation and interaction complexity. However, critical to successful employment of such modeling technologies is tight integration between modeling and software artifacts.

Speaker's profile:
 Patrick Lardieri is Manager of Distributed Processing Programs at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories in Cherry Hill, NJ. He has spent over 17 years researching the suitability of open, standards based middleware, operating systems, and networks for building distributed real-time systems. Recently, he was the program manager for Lockheed Martin's Software Technology Initiative, which is focused on developing technologies for managing the complexity of integrating large scale software systems. He received a Masters in Electrical Engineering from University of Pennsylvania and is currently working toward a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Drexel University.

"Predicting Value from Early Design Models"
Mary Shaw

Abstract:
Early design decisions in software projects profoundly affect both the properties and the costs of the eventual implementation. It is much easier and cheaper to change these decisions during design than after implementation has yielded running code. As a result, early decisions about architecture can profoundly affect dependability. The value of a system to a given user depends on the needs of that user; different users have different requirements for dependability, for example. Improvements in our ability to predict properties of an implementation without actually inspecting the code would enable software designers to better understand the consequences of early decisions and would facilitate comparison of design alternatives to a degree not currently possible. This talk will discuss some code-free predictive evaluation techniques and the challenges of harnessing them to provide a unified framework for reasoning about the overall value that should arise from a design.

Speaker's profile:
 Mary Shaw is the Alan J. Perlis Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She has been a member of this faculty since completing the Ph.D. degree at Carnegie-Mellon in 1972. Her research interests in computer science lie primarily in the areas of software engineering, particularly value-driven software design, appropriate dependability, and software architecture.

"Dependence and Modularity in Software-Intensive Systems Products and Development Processes
(The Case of Aspect-Oriented Programming)"
Kevin Sullivan

Abstract:
Software artifacts and the processes by which they are all developed and changed reflect complex, interdependent, evolving decisions. While the decisions in force at any given time determine system properties at that time, it is the structure of interdependences among the decisions that determines the capacity of an organization to change them over time to maintain or improve system properties and value. Mapping and managing these interdependences is thus among the most important tasks facing the software-intensive systems architect. Yet we continue to operate today with inadequate concepts, models, analysis tools, and languages for managing interdependences in and across artifacts, processes, and environments. This talk will discuss emerging work on an extended and better unified model for managing software interdependence structures. To make these ideas concrete the talk will show how these were used to analyze certain ideas about aspect-oriented programming, and to improve them with a new kind of interface: the crosscut programming interface, or XPI.

Speaker's profile:
 Kevin Sullivan is Associate Professor and Virginia Engineering Foundation Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Virginia. His PhD in Computer Science and Engineering is from the University of Washington. His research interests in computer science are in software-intensive systems, in general, with a particular focus on software engineering. His current projects are on modularity in design including non-traditional models, software evolution, and economics.