Faculty Presentations 1

9:10 am to 10:30 am
9:10 - 9:30
"Simulating Cities: A Systems Design Perspective"
Cristina Videira Lopes, Professor, Dept. of Informatics, UC Irvine
Abstract:
I have been exploring how some of the ideas underlying Aspect-Oriented Programming can help overcome the design challenges faced by distributed simulation systems, as applied to urban simulations. There are many similarities between the concept of aspect (as given by AOP) and the general concept of "aspect of a city" that urban planning researchers routinely use. This talk looks at urban simulations from a systems design perspective, and puts forward the idea that non-traditional decompositions are not just beneficial for these applications, but are likely the only way to move that field forward.
 
Bio:
Prof. Cristina (Crista) Lopes is Professor of Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on programming and software engineering for large-scale data and systems. Early in her career, she was a founding member of the team at Xerox PARC that developed Aspect-Oriented Programming. Along with her research program, she is also a prolific software developer. Her open source contributions include being one of the core developers of OpenSimulator, a virtual world server. She is also a founder and consultant of Encitra, a company specializing in online virtual reality for early-stage sustainable urban redevelopment projects. Her book "Exercises in Programming Style" has gained rave reviews, including being chosen as "Notable Book" by the ACM Best of Computing reviews. She has a PhD from Northeastern University, and MS and BS degrees from Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal. She is the recipient of several National Science Foundation grants, including a prestigious CAREER Award. She claims to be the only person in the world who is both an ACM Distinguished Scientist and Ohloh Kudos Rank 9.
 
9:30- 9:50

"Crowd Design"
André van der Hoek, Professor and Chair of Informatics Dept., UC Irvine
Abstract:
In this talk, I report on a series of experiments that we have conducted to understand whether a crowd can generate diverse and high-quality solutions to small software design problems. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk, we compared a number of three experimental conditions: UI versus code internals, seeing examples of others' work versus not, and seeding only good examples of others' work versus all examples. various surprising effects happened, including examples having a negative effect on the overall quality of the pool of solutions.

I introduce the experiment, discuss the results, and offer an agenda for further work in crowdsourcing software design.
 
Bio:

André van der Hoek serves as chair of the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a joint B.S. and M.S. degree in Business-Oriented Computer Science from Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He heads the Software Design and Collaboration Laboratory, which focuses on understanding and advancing the roles of design, collaboration, and education in software development. He has authored and co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, and in 2006 was a recipient of an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. He is a co-author of the 2005 Configuration Management Impact Report as well as the 2007 Futures of Software Engineering Report on Software Design and Architecture. He has served on numerous international program committees, was a member of the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology from 2008 to 2014, was program chair of the 2010 ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, and was program co-chair of the 2014 International Conference on Software Engineering. He was recognized as an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2013, and in 2009 he was a recipient of the Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware. He is the principal designer of the B.S. in Informatics at UC Irvine and was honored, in 2005, as UC Irvine Professor of the Year for his outstanding and innovative educational contributions.

 

Slides: ISR Forum 2016-vanderHoek.pdf

 
9:50 - 10:10
"Mobile App Security: Detection and Family Identification of the Malice in your Pocket"
Sam Malek, Associate Professor, Dept. of Informatics, UC Irvine
Abstract:
As the dominant mobile computing platform, Android has become a prime target for cyber-security attacks. In this talk, I first provide an overview of mobile security threats as well as my research over the past few years aimed at mitigating these threats. I then provide a more detailed description of the most recent tool from my research lab, called RevealDroid, for detection and family classification of Android malware. RevealDroid employs machine-learning techniques to not only learn what makes an Android app malicious, but also the types of malicious activities it performs. It uses features that are obfuscation resilient and extractable through lightweight program analysis from app binary files. Evaluation of RevealDroid against thousands of real-world malware has shown it to be highly accurate, efficient, and obfuscation resilient. RevealDroid is integrated into the Department of Homeland Security’s SWAMP environment and currently used by the various government agencies and their partners in vetting Android apps.
 
Bio:

Sam Malek is an Associate Professor in the Informatics Department within the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is also a member of the Institute for Software Research and the director of Software Engineering and Analysis Lab. Malek’s general research interests are in the field of software engineering, and to date his focus has spanned the areas of software architecture, autonomic computing, mobile computing, and software analysis and testing. The underlying theme of his research has been to devise techniques and tools that aid with the construction, analysis, and maintenance of large-scale software systems. Malek received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and his B.S. degree in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. He has received numerous awards for his research contributions, including the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2013), GMU Emerging Researcher/Scholar/Creator award (2013), and GMU Computer Science Department Outstanding Faculty Research Award (2011). Malek is on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and the Springer Journal of Computing. He provides software expert witness consulting through Quandary Peak Research.

 

Slides: ISR Forum Talk 2016-Malek.pdf

 
10:10 - 10:30
 
"Global Software Engineering: Industry and Research"
David Redmiles, Professor, Dept. of Informatics, UC Irvine
Abstract:
During the first week of August, UCI / ISR will host the Eleventh IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (icgse.org), which seeks to bring together both industry practitioners and academic researchers. Anticipating this event is an excellent reason to reflect on past, present, and future work in globally distributed software engineering. Topics closer to research include bridging distance, building awareness, strengthening coordination, engendering trust, among others. Topics closer to industry include seeking to scale agile processes, improving communication, building models and taxonomies, and more. While this talk will cover many topics quickly, it will provide points of reference for further reading. The content will draw heavily on topics in the ICGSE conference and, thus, both foreshadow and promote the upcoming conference as well as the research area in general.
 
Bio:
David Redmiles is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He is the author of over 100 research publications integrating the areas of software engineering, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work. He has graduated 11 PhD students and served on the dissertation committees of over 30 other PhD students. For many years, he has been involved in the IEEE/ACM Conference on Automated Software Engineering, serving on the steering committee and organizing the 2005 conference as General Chair. That research community designated him Fellow of Automated Software Engineering in 2009 and in 2010 awarded him and his co-authors the first Most Influential Paper Award for their 1996 paper on software design environments. The Argo/UML system described in that paper continues to evolve as a widely adopted design tool supported by a lively open-source community. His current research focuses on distributed and collaborative software engineering, especially the aspects of awareness and trust among collaborators. From 2004 to 2011, he chaired the Department of Informatics at UCI. During this period there was a great expansion of the faculty, facilities, and degree programs. He is serving as General Chair of the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE).