SE Seminar
From SE Wiki
Preamble
Our SE Seminar takes place each week to present the work of SE group members and invited speakers. Attendance is open to everybody. Feel free to propose new seminars. Contact Golnaz to arrange a talk.
- When: 2pm - 4pm, Wednesdays
- Where: SE Debugging Room (the lounge area in the new SE Lab)
- Future Seminars
Wednesday, November 18th, 2pm to 4pm in the debugging room
- Sofia Passova (CEO, President and Founder) and Team -- Stereologic technology and demo presentation
Sofia Passova (CEO, President and Founder) of StereoLogic will come and give a demo of their business process discovery tool. They will discuss some of the problems they could potentially collaborate on with university researchers. They have some interesting business process model presentation issues and collaboration challenges which might be of interest to the group. It will be an informal discussion about interesting challenges and ideas coming out of their technology and demo.
Friday, September 25th, 3pm in the debugging room #BA3234 (the talk would be 20-30minutes)
- Alicia Grubb -- Through the Looking Glass -- Perceptions of Scientists -- Practice talk
The talk will focus on the results of the questionnaire I conducted this summer.
The goal of our research is to categorize the views of scientists on the topics of reproducibility, credibility, scooping, data sharing, results sharing, and the effectiveness of the peer review process.
Monday June 22, 2pm, room #BA3234 (Debugging Room)
- Margit Schwab -- Conceptualization of the i* Method in the ADOxx v1.0 Meta-Modelling Platform
The talk outlines the transfer of the i* Method to the ADOxx v1.0 Meta-Modelling Platform. We, the Dept. of Knowledge and Business Engineering (DKE) at the University of Vienna, denote such a transfer “conceptualization” as we think it is not a linear implementation in an arbitrary platform. The necessary steps of this conceptualization of a given, predefined method on ADOxx v1.0 will be presented. In addition the used platform provides “a set of” basic functionality which is available for all implementations realized for the platform, e.g. analysis queries or reports. The talk is intended to be a “status report” of the i* Method conceptualization in ADOxx v1.0 at this stage. ADOxx v1.0 is an application provided by the DKE. It is a development platform for designing methods for conceptual modelling based on a meta-modelling concept. Due to its open and flexible approach the platform is highly adaptable. Once a meta-model or method is defined, a separate application with an easy to use interface allows the user to capture the required knowledge in form of models as instances of the formally defined meta-model.
Margit joined the team at the University of Vienna, Dept. of Knowledge and Business Engineering at the beginning of the winter term 2008 as a doctoral student of business informatics.
During her professional career with the BOC Information Technologies Consulting Group, she could gain project experience in the area of process management in the financial industry with a main focus on insurance and reinsurance. Due to her process and subject matter knowledge in this area – she was in charge for the company’s reference process library. Besides her international project experiences, the current research topics are in the fields of quality & risk management, process sourcing & strategic aspects of process design, change management and process-based compliance management.
- Wednesday June 17, 2pm-3:30pm, room # BA1170
- Steve Easterbrook -- Software Engineering for the Planet
This session is a call to action. What can we, as software engineers, do to help tackle the challenge of climate change (besides reducing our personal carbon footprints)? The session will review recent results from climate science, showing how big the challenge is. We will then identify ways in which software engineering tools and techniques can help. The goal is to build a research agenda and a community of software engineering researchers willing to pursue it.
The ICSE organisers have worked hard this year to make the conference “greener” - to reduce our impact on the environment. This is partly in response to the growing worldwide awareness that we need to take more care of the natural environment. But it is also driven by a deeper and more urgent concern.
During this century, we will have to face up to a crisis that will make the current economic turmoil look like a walk in the park. Climate change is accelerating, confirming the more pessimistic of scenarios identified by climate scientists [1]. Its effects will touch everything, including the flooding of low-lying lands and coastal cities, the disruption of fresh water supplies for much of the world, the loss of agricultural lands, more frequent and severe extreme weather events, mass extinctions, and the destruction of entire ecosystems [2].
And there are no easy solutions. We need concerted systematic change in how we live, to reduce emissions so as to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases that drive climate change. Not to give up the conveniences of modern life, but to re-engineer them so that we no longer depend on fossil fuels to power our lives. The challenge is massive and urgent - a planetary emergency. The type of emergency that requires all hands on deck. Scientists, engineers, policymakers, professionals, no matter what their discipline, need to ask how their skills and experience can contribute.
We, as software engineering researchers and software practitioners have many important roles to play. Our information systems help provide the data we need to support intelligent decision making, from individuals trying to reduce their energy consumption, to policymakers trying to design effective governmental policies. Our control systems allow us to make smarter use of the available power, and provide the adaptability and reliability to power our technological infrastructure in the face of a more diverse set of renewable energy sources.
The ICSE community in particular has many other contributions to make. We have developed practices and tools to analyze, build and evolve some of the most complex socio-technical systems ever created, and to coordinate the efforts of large teams of engineers. We have developed abstractions that help us to understand complex systems, to describe their structure and behaviour, and to understand the effects of change on those systems. These tools and practices are likely to be useful in our struggle to address the climate crisis, often in strange and surprising ways. For example, can we apply the principles of information hiding and modularity to our attempts to develop coordinated solutions to climate change? What is the appropriate architectural pattern for an integrated set of climate policies? How can we model the problem requirements so that the stakeholders can understand them? How do we debug the models on which policy decision are based?
This conference session is intended to kick start a discussion about the contributions that software engineering research can make to tackling the climate crisis. Our aim is to build a community of concerned professionals, and find new ways to apply our skills and experience to the problem. We will attempt to map out a set of ideas for action, and identify potential roadblocks. We will start to build a broad research agenda, to capture the potential contributions of software engineering research, and discuss strategies for researchers to refocus their research towards this agenda. The session will begin with a short summary of the latest lessons from climate science, and a concrete set of examples of existing software engineering research efforts applied to climate change. We will include an open discussion session, to map out an agenda for action. We invite everyone to come to the session, and take up this challenge.
References:
[1] http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=65
[2] http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg2.htm=
[Note: This is a repeat of the talk Steve gave at ICSE]
- Wednesday June 3rd, 2009, 2-4 pm, room # BA3234
- Maurício Serrano (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)) -- Requirements-Driven Software Transparency
Transparency is an important concept of modern societies. Thus, the software, which is embedded in several society scenarios, must also be transparent. In this context, software engineers will need to develop an adequate technological support to help make transparent software. The software must be able, for example, to clearly answer the citizens’ questionings. In our work we propose a requirementsdriven software transparency approach in order to help the citizen when there is a need for information about how the software is performing its tasks. Our approach is requirements-driven as we enable the software to “work” with requirements, to “think” in terms of requirements, and to be “requirementsaware.” We are formalizing our proposal by describing the process behind this idea anchored on intentional modeling, and detailing the meta models used to make the software “requirements-aware.” In this talk, I will also present the work conducted in the Software Transparency Research Group at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio, Brazil).
Maurício Serrano completed his undergraduate studies in Computer Engineering, and obtained his
Master Degree in Computer Science (Database Area) at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar). He
also worked as software developer at the ShEST (Shrimp EST Genome Project) - Expressed Sequence Tags
of the Litopenaeus vannamei marine shrimp. Actually, he is PhD Candidate in Informatics at the
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) – Software Transparency Research Group, in
cooperation with the University of Toronto (UofT) - Department of Computer Science. His advisor at
PUC-Rio is Professor Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite, and his sponsor at the UofT is Professor John
Mylopoulos. He has experience in Computer Science, focusing on Software Engineering, and Database.
His research interests are Software Transparency, Multi-Agent Systems, and Goal Oriented Requirements
Engineering.
E-mail: mauserr@cs.toronto.edu or mauserr@les.inf.puc-rio.br
Site of the Software Transparency Research Group at PUC-Rio: http://transparencia.les.inf.puc-rio.br/
Site of the Requirements Engineering Research Group at PUC-Rio: http://www.er.les.inf.puc-rio.br/
- Milene Serrano (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)) -- Systematic Software Development for Ubiquitous Computing Driven by Agents' Intentionality
A typically scenario in the Ubiquitous Computing is composed of users, who have personal preferences, different needs, and heterogeneous devices. These users usually want to access several contents (e.g. images, videos, music, and files), and to perform various day-by-day activities (e.g. download something, access a peripheral device, search something in the Internet, and pay a bill). They also want to perform these activities anywhere and anytime. Thus, they commonly use different kinds of devices. Some of these devices are limited in terms of memory and processing capacities, and some of them are powerful. Some of them are mobile and others are not. They have different features (e.g. screen resolution, and allowed image types). In this scenario, for example, the user’s mobility, the device heterogeneity, and the service omnipresence are intrinsic. We can view the Ubiquitous Computing as a novel paradigm that poses some particular challenges for the software engineers, for example: How can I personalize and adapt different contents based on the users’ preferences, devices features, and users’ intentions, by considering some specific non-functional requirements (e.g. security, privacy policies, and users’ satisfaction), anywhere and anytime? We have several authors that investigate ubiquitous contexts and propose interesting solutions for different challenges, such as content adaptation, context awareness, distribution, mobility, and security. Despite all the efforts to propose support for Ubiquitous Computing, there is a lack of approaches that consider the ubiquitous software development from the requirements to code. Most of the found researches are issue-specific-oriented. It is difficult to find, based on the Software Engineering perspective, an approach that guides the software engineers in the development of ubiquitous software by considering all the disciplines of the software development process. In order to contribute to this technological gap, we are trying to offer a technological set to deal with some ubiquitous applications challenges, and to orient the software engineer in the systematic development of ubiquitous software. We are also documenting our approach as a specific ubiquitous profile (using the building blocks concept), and based on the TROPOS disciplines, goal-orientation, and intentional multi-agent systems. In this talk, I will present the work conducted in the Ubiquitous Computing Research Group at the Software Engineering Laboratory (LES, PUC-Rio, Brazil).
Milene Serrano completed her undergraduate studies in Computer Engineering, and obtained her Master
Degree in Computer Science (Software Engineering Area) at the Federal University of São Carlos
(UFSCar). She also worked as researcher and developer at the APYON STUDIO Project – Business Rules
Dependency Model, and the impacts among them. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Informatics at the
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) – Software Engineering Laboratory (LES), in
cooperation with the University of Toronto (UofT) - Department of Computer Science. Her advisor at
PUC-Rio is Professor Carlos José Pereira de Lucena, and her sponsor at the UofT is Professor John
Mylopoulos. She has experience in Computer Science, focusing on Software Engineering. Her main
research interests include the topics: Ubiquitous/Pervasive/Mobile Computing, Intentional Multi-Agent
Systems, and Goal-Orientation.
E-mail: milene@cs.toronto.edu or milene@les.inf.puc-rio.br
Site of the Ubiquitous Research Group at PUC-Rio: http://sites.google.com/site/ubcompgroup/
Wiki of the Software Engineering Laboratory (LES): http://wiki.les.inf.puc-rio.br/
- Previous Seminars
- Markus Strohmaier (Graz University of Technology) -- User Goals and Motivation in Social Tagging Systems
Tagging can be understood as the task of freely associating keywords from an open vocabulary with a single or multiple resources (such as images or URLs). The tags used for this purpose sometimes contain what we can describe as ?traces of user intent?, that is traces of user goals, motivations and intentions expressed in different degrees of explicitness. These traces enable researchers not only to study the semantic structure or the content of resources being tagged, but to an increasingly extent enables us to study the goals, motivations and intentions of users who are using these systems.
In this talk, I will present work conducted in my group that focuses on two problems related to user intent in social tagging systems: 1) relating intent and content via tags 2) the automatic detection of users' motivation for tagging.
I will begin by discussing the different ways in which tags are being used in social tagging systems. In contrast to common types of tags that mostly focus on content, I will present the idea of intent annotations that aims to relate user intent to the resources found in social tagging systems. By presenting data from a preliminary study, I will explain how this idea could help unveil the pragmatic context of resources in social tagging systems.
Second, I will focus on work aiming to automatically detect users' motivation for tagging. I will motivate the relevance and implications of user motivation in tagging systems. Subsequently, I will present preliminary results from an ongoing research effort aiming to model user motivation in tagging systems as a two-mode network problem.
Markus Strohmaier is an Associate Professor at the Knowledge Management Institute at Graz University of Technology, Austria since 06/2007. From 03/2006 to 05/2007 he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Eric Yu's group at the Department of Computer Science at University of Toronto, which was funded by an FWF Erwin Schroedinger Postdoctoral Fellowship. He is principal investigator of the 2.5 years basic research project "TransAgere" that focuses on the role of (human) agents and goals on the social web (2007-2010). His research interests include web research, knowledge management and intentional knowledge bases.
- Friday May 15, 2009, 3:00 -4:00 pm, BA3234
- Patrick Hung (UOIT) -- Mobile Blood Donation Registration Service -- Security and Privacy Issues
This talk presents a case study of adopting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the Hong Kong Red Cross to support blood transfusion services. Every time a blood donor attends a donation center, he/she must proceed through the registration process, requiring them to fill in the registration form, regardless of whether they are a first-time-donor. Based on some research studies, the registration process is a cumbersome and time consuming process which increases the drop-out rate of blood donors. The purposes of this research project are to optimize the process and minimize the drop-out rate of blood donors by using semantic rules. Using the Web 2.0 and semantic Web technologies, the system includes a novel service which supports the privacy access control and security, in protecting the donors’ personal information provided throughout the blood donation process. The system is built on the mobile model of SOA and XML related security technologies. This talk discusses the security and privacy issues of such a mobile service. The system is currently being tested and studied in the Hong Kong Red Cross blood donation center. In addition, an empirical study of technology adoption is also conducted at the site to test the usability and feasibility of such a system from the blood donors’ perspectives. The system is planned to launch at the blood donation centers in August 2009.
Patrick Hung is an Associate Professor and the Graduate Program Director at the Faculty of Business and Information Technology in UOIT. He is also an Adjunct Faculty Member at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in University of Waterloo. Patrick is currently collaborating with Boeing Phantom Works (Seattle, USA) and Bell Canada on security- and privacy-related research projects. He is also cooperating on Web services composition research projects with Southeast University in China, and on a mobile healthcare project with the Hong Kong Red Cross with the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is an executive committee member of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Steering Committee for Services Computing, a steering member of EDOC "Enterprise Computing," and an associate editor/editorial board member/guest editor in several international journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), International Journal of Web Services Research (JWSR) and International journal of Business Process and Integration Management (IJBPIM). He has been published more than 100 research and technical articles in International journals, conferences and workshops.
- Friday May 15, 2009, 4:00 - 4:30 pm, BA3234
- Golnaz Elahi - Trade-off analysis for security requirements
In this talk, I will present some ideas which was recently got accepted as a short paper to RE'09. The talk would be more in form a research proposal:
In developing software systems, security is typically only one requirement among many, which may compete with other requirements such as privacy and usability. Besides, security requirements often have implicit assumptions about trust relationships among actors. Since trust always involves the risk of mistrust, trusting system actors also implies a tradeoff: gaining some benefits from depending on a second party in trade for getting exposed to security and privacy risks. Ultimately, security is about balancing the trade-offs among the competing goals of multiple actors. By taking advantage of agent- and goal-oriented analysis, we propose a method for discovering security requirements trade-offs. This method aims to help the analyst select among alternative solutions or dependency relationships by making explicit trade-offs and in a way that reaches a balance between costs and benefits.
Past sessions
- March 10, 2009
- Golnaz Elahi (University of Toronto) -- An Ontology for Vulnerabilities- Research under progress
Security needs are the responses to being (or feeling) vulnerable. Vulnerable actors take measures to mitigate perceived vulnerabilities, by using locks on the doors, surveillance cameras, etc. In computer security engineering, vulnerabilities are viewed as weaknesses in the requirements, design, and implementation, which attackers exploit to compromise the system.
This work proposes a conceptual foundation for integrating the concept of vulnerabilities (as flaws and weaknesses) into the system development as early as possible. In particular, we identify the basic concepts to model and analyze vulnerabilities and their effects on the system and stakeholders. These concepts drive the definition of criteria that make it possible to compare and evaluate security frameworks based on vulnerabilities. We also show how the proposed conceptual foundation can be used to define or extend requirements engineering frameworks for security analysis and relate system vulnerabilities to vulnerable stakeholders within the system.
To make the discussion more concrete, we use the i* framework as an example. We show how integrating system or environment vulnerabilities into the i* social and organizational models help identify vulnerable stakeholders and make security decisions according to the actors at the risk.
- February 10, 2009
- Neil Ernst (Toronto) -- Software quality and software evolution -- project blog
In the past 10-15 years, the number of open and accessible data sources on software development has grown tremendously, giving us a good opportunity to work with real-world data. The MSR challenge is a component of an ICSE workshop that presents, annually, a set of software data repositories, along with a challenge to 'discover something interesting' about those repositories. This year the focus is on the GNOME set of Linux applications.
While many participants have focused on source code, in order to predict software evolution, analyze social networks, etc., I have chosen to examine the nature of software quality as it is referenced in GNOME projects, including bug reports, mailing list discussions, and commit logs. In this talk I will describe my overall approach to mining software qualities in GNOME projects. The final report is due in a month, so I am interested in a 'reality check' from my colleagues: are my methods reasonable? Am I missing something? What other threats to validity should I consider?
- Dec 11, 2008
- Jennifer Horkoff (U of Toronto) - Everything you ever wanted to know about Goal- and Agent-Oriented Model Analysis - And More!
This practice talk for a Depth Oral Exam will review approaches to analysis for goal- and agent-oriented models, include qualitative and quantitative approaches for analyzing goal satisfaction, metrics over models, planning, simulation, and model checking. We also cover methods to improve model quality, as well as several approaches to representing and reasoning over design trade-offs in Requirements Engineering and Business.
- Dec 4, 2008
- Golnaz Elahi (U of Toronto) - Modeling Knowledge Transfer in a Software Maintenance Organization - An Experience Report and Critical Analysis
Modeling notations have been introduced to help understand the why behind software processes. We ask how are these techniques be- ing used in industrial practices? The first part of this paper reports on the experiences at an industrial software organization, Ericsson Marconi SpA, in applying i* modeling to analyze knowledge transfer effective- ness for software maintenance. The modeling was done in-house without consultation with the i* research community. In the second part of the paper, university researchers analyze the modeling experience in that or- ganization, drawing a comparison with the usage of i* typically envisaged by the research community. We found that the modeling approach used at the industry site employed smaller and simplified models, but were effective for highlighting key issues for the organization and communi- cation. From the case study, we draw some conclusions for the future development of the i* modeling approach.
- Alecia Fowler (U of Toronto) - Web-Mapping Accessibility
Designing a web-mapping application that conforms to accessibility standards.
- Maryam Fazel-Zarandi (U of Toronto) - Ontology-Based Expertise Finding
To accomplish knowledge intensive tasks, people in organizations must be able to find the knowledge or information needed to solve complex problems. For this, people often rely on their past experiences, explicit documents, and others who have the needed expertise. Knowledge Management Systems that enhance and facilitate the process of finding the right expert in an organization have gained much attention in recent years. This paper explores the potential benefits and challenges of using ontologies for improving existing systems. A modeling technique from requirements engineering is used to evaluate the proposed system and analyze the impact it would have on the goals of the stakeholders. This paper also discusses the organizational settings required for the successful deployment of the system in practice.
- Nov 20, 2008
- Steve Easterbrook (U of Totonto) - Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change
Climate scientists build large, complex simulations with little or no software engineering training, and do not readily adopt the latest software engineering tools and techniques. In this talk, I describe an ethnographic study of the culture and practices of climate scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre. The study examined how the scientists think about software correctness, how they prioritize requirements, and how they develop a shared understanding of their models. The findings show that climate scientists have developed customized techniques for verification and validation that are tightly integrated into their approach to scientific research. Their software practices share many features of both agile and open source projects, in that they rely on self-organisation of the teams, extensive use of informal communication channels, and developers who are also users and domain experts. These comparisons offer insights into why such practices work.
- Nov 13, 2008
- Jordi Cabot (U of Toronto) - Integrating Sustainability in the Decision-Making Process, A Modelling Strategy
One of the most difficult problems that humanity currently faces is the sustainable development of our society, i.e. how to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Solving this challenge requires a multidisciplinary approach where researchers with different backgrounds combine their efforts. As software engineers, we can contribute to these efforts by offering existing software requirements modeling and analysis techniques as a means to integrate sustainability requirements in decision-making processes. In this paper, we use a popular language for modeling early requirements as a way to visualize the impact of alternative options on sustainability goals and to analyze the conflicts between sustainability and other problem-specific objectives. We apply this idea to the decision-making activities pertaining to the organization of the ICSE’09 conference itself. We find that the modeling activity significantly facilitates exploration, understanding and comparison of large numbers of possible sustainability measures and allows for better informed and justified decisions.
- Nov 6, 2008
- Ivan Jureta (University of Namur, Belgium) - Revisiting the Core Ontology, Problem, and Resolution Framework in Requirements Engineering
In their seminal paper in the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Zave and Jackson established a core ontology for Requirements Engineering (RE) and used it to formulate the ``requirements problem, thereby defining what it means to successfully complete RE. Starting from the premise that stakeholders of the system-to-be communicate the information needed to perform RE, limitations of Zave and Jackson's ontology will be discussed. I will argue that it does not cover all types of basic concerns that the stakeholders communicate. These include beliefs, desires, intentions, and attitudes. In response, a core ontology for requirements will be outlined that covers these concerns and is grounded in sound conceptual foundations resting on a foundational ontology. The new core ontology for RE leads to a new formulation of the requirements problem that extends Zave and Jackson's formulation. We thereby establish new standards for what minimum information should be represented in RE languages and new criteria for determining whether RE has been successfully completed. I will then discuss the features of a framework for the resolution of the requirements problem, and how it differs from the usual proposals in requirements engineering.
- Oct 7, 2008
- Jennifer Horkoff (U of Toronto) - Reflective Analysis of the Syntax and Semantics of the i* Framework
Conceptual modeling notations are often designed without the benefit of empirical input. Reflective analysis of modeling languages can help find the gap between the intended design of the language and its use in practice. In this paper, we study instances of the i* goal and agent-oriented Framework to analyze differences between the core i* syntax developed at the University of Toronto and existing variations. We have surveyed 15 student assignments and 15 academic papers and presentations in order to capture and analyze the most common i* syntax variations. Through this analysis we offer insights into i* syntax and suggestions to improve the framework and increase consistency between models.
