Prof. Paul Dourish is co-leading the newly established Intel Science and Technology Center (ISTC) for Social Computing at UC Irvine, together with UCI Anthropology and Law professor Bill Maurer and Scott Mainwaring of Intel Labs. Launched in late June 2012, the interdisciplinary center applies social science and humanities to the design and analysis of digital information.
ISR
Spotlight
ISR research professor Walt Scacchi (Ph.D. ’81), received the Donald Bren School of ICS’s 2012 Distinguished Alumnus Award at the 42nd annual Lauds & Laurels ceremony in May.
This spring saw the re-launch of the ISR Research Forum, a one-day event designed to encourage industry-academia interactions, collaborative research, and technology transition. Revamped with a new format featuring an ‘open house’ and quick 20 minute faculty research talks, the 2012 Forum was an enthusiastic success!
During the week of March 26-30 ISR Prof. Walt Scacchi visited with Daegu, Korea government officials, industry leaders, and academic colleagues to discuss establishment of a long-term research collaboration with ISR. The visits included a 30 minute meeting with the Mayor of Daegu City, Kim Bumil, who conveyed his personal interest in recognizing the win-win value of a long-term research relationship between Daegu and UCI. Daegu City has been designated by the Korean national government as the IT Convergence Center for South Korea, which will focus on research, development, and commercialization of software-based systems for advanced health care and medical research, green energy, advanced manufacturing, embedded software applications for consumer electronics and automotive systems, and computer games and 3D virtual worlds.
On February 27, ISR Prof. Walt Scacchi delivered a half-day tutorial at GSAW 2012 on the topic of “Using Open Source Software in Ground Systems.” The tutorial addressed the state of the art in open source software development (OSSD) processes, work practices, and project community dynamics, and examined results from recent empirical studies of OSSD. It was targeted towards software developers, system architects, project managers, program managers, and others. The well-attended tutorial included participants from a mix of aerospace companies and government agencies.
I had the honor of chairing the ACM Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH/OOPSLA) this year. That means that I was like a Producer, and got to do all the work behind the scenes to make the conference come to life. After a year and a half of “programming,” I pressed “run” on October 21. It’s a little crazy if you believe in agile. A whole year and a half of designing and “programming,” with no testing whatsoever, no small chunks, just a long process of envisioning, estimating, guessing, coordinating, signing contracts, making decisions; then we unleash the event over 5 days with almost 600 people and hope for the best!
Whereas many view software system complexity, immensity, and dynamism as formidable difficulties, ISR Professor James A. Jones views these traits with excitement. “Software is a living artifact — constantly changing — full of complexities and intricacies that are fascinating to imagine” says Jones. He puts such imagination to work through his research, which assists developers in understanding how programs are behaving — both correctly and incorrectly — for performing maintenance tasks and for finding and fixing bugs.
In March 2011, Christoph Dorn from the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) in Austria joined ISR as a post-doctoral visiting researcher. Dorn completed his Ph.D. on Adaptation Techniques in large-scale Service-oriented Systems in 2009 and continued as a post-doctoral researcher at the Distributed Systems Group (TU Wien).
ISR continued its tradition of participating in the Ground System Architectures Workshop (GSAW), which is sponsored by The Aerospace Corporation – one of ISR’s long-time supporters. GSAW has been held in cooperation with ISR since 2003. GSAW 2011 was held February 28-March 3 in Los Angeles.
During the past decade, USC Professor and ISR Faculty Associate, Nenad Medvidović has been looking at the role software engineering plays—and should play—in the emerging, related fields of grid computing and, more recently, cloud computing. Medvidović’s recent collaborative work with Yuriy Brun, his former Ph.D. student and currently an NSF CRA Postdoctoral Computing Innovation Fellow at the University of Washington, has focused on providing security and privacy guarantees to users of inherently insecure clouds. In this effort, which grew out of a collaborative research project with Director Richard N.